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Welcome back to Gnostic Insights and to the Gnostic Reformation on Substack. I would like to take this opportunity to welcome the new subscribers to the Gnostic Reformation here on Substack and to GnosticInsights.com. Did you know that there are three Gnostic Gospels that I have written? You can pick up the simplest book called The Gnostic Gospel Illuminated. It’s very short. Half of it is illustrations. Very simple. Very, very simple to understand this Gnosticism. This will give you the basics of what it is that I share. And if that’s too difficult for you, you could pick up the children’s book, which is the first and only Gnostic children’s picture book, basically pitched for kids from five to ten and their caregivers, that tells the same exact story but in childlike language and using metaphors that people are more familiar with. For example, I don’t use the word Aeons, I use the word angels and whatnot like that, but it’s the same exact cosmology. The children’s book is called Children of the Fullness: A Gnostic Myth. But the big book, the one that puts it all together, almost 300 pages, is called A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel. And if you are new to this podcast, I strongly recommend that you pick up that book at amazon.com because it will give it all to you in a very easy to follow way. And it’s all there. And it’s also lavishly illustrated by me, of course. So please, I’ve got them at amazon.com. They’re self-published. And if you have read any of those books, please leave a review on Amazon. I have very few reviews. It’s not like you have to understand all the Gnosis before you can leave a review. Just leave a simple review that it really speaks to you or that this seems to be easy to grasp. I would really, really appreciate it. Now, let’s get on with this week’s episode. Welcome back to Gnostic Insights and to the Gnostic Reformation on Substack. Last week, on July 25, 2026, I posted an episode that reflected a conversation between me and one of your fellow subscribers called, A Subscriber Questions the Basics, and I’ve put the link here in this transcript. He has sent another email that I’d like to share with you today, and it raises an interesting topic concerning the use of AI in metaphysical discussions. He says, “I know I just promised to stop, but this one is interesting. Seems you have impressed my demiurgic companion, ChatGPT. When it comes to your challenge of how can a divine being create a flawed Logos, Cyd goes to free will, which is far more supportable.” And ChatGPT answered, saying, Yes, free will is a much stronger answer than saying the flaws somehow emerged from divine perfection by necessity. It allows Cyd to argue Logos was created good, not defective. Genuine freedom included the possibility of acting independently. Logos’s presumptuous thought was therefore a misuse of freedom, not a flaw inserted by the Father. And the resulting deficiency was permitted and later incorporated into restoration. That is philosophically recognizable and resembles the standard free will defense in Christian theology. It does not remove every difficulty, though. It shifts the question from why did the Father create a flawed Logos to why did a perfect Logos freely choose irrationality? It says, “That is easier to defend, but still requires an explanation.” But I have to jump in to correct that basic assertion right now. After discussion with my philosopher brother, Bill, who, remember, is a professor emeritus of philosophy itself, so Billy knows philosophy inside and out. I myself am not a “philosopher” other than by natural talent. I am a rhetorician and a psychologist—slightly different. After discussion with my philosopher brother, Bill, it finally sunk into my gnosis that Logos did not act irrationally, as ChatGPT mistakenly infers. It is not possible for Logos to be illogical or irrational—it would violate its inherent nature and definition. Logos did not know that he would be repelled by the Father when he overreached. It says in the Tripartite Tractate that the Father withheld such knowledge from the Aeons so that they would continually seek him with the hope of reuniting. So what Logos did was reasonable given the limited knowledge he had. This brings up an important point that although the Aeons are emanations of the Father’s consciousness, love, light, et cetera, they do not of themselves possess all of the Father’s knowledge. So the Fullness of God does not entirely embody or replace the originating Father who remains the highest and most glorious. Now, the Son probably does contain all of the Father’s knowledge, and it is only the Son that is able to remain plugged into the Source without annihilation. Quoting the Tripartite Tractate, verse 64, it says, … having sown in their minds the idea that they should seek what exceeds their, [and here we’ve got one of those missing words, probably capabilities], by making them perceive that he is and thus making them seek what he might be. Now back to the ChatGPT, There is also a tension with providence. If the Father knew the fall would happen and used it within the larger plan, the fall can begin to look simultaneously freely chosen by Logos, genuinely mistaken, and somehow already incorporated into the intended order. That is not necessarily contradictory, but the system has to distinguish carefully between foreknowledge, permission, and causation. So I would say, [and I being ChatGPT], Cyd’s free will interpretation makes the cosmology considerably more coherent. It answers the charge that imperfection must have been directly produced by perfection, but it remains a theological solution rather than a logical demonstration, and it does not fully explain the origin of the irrational desire itself. Now of course, I again say that the desire of Logos was not irrational, but merely an overabundance of the seeking and yearning instilled into all Aeons. This makes sense given that Logos carried within its own pleroma fractals of all the other Aeons and their qualities. Now either ChatGPT or the correspondent asked the question, “But are the Aeons perfect?” And ChatGPT answers, Not absolutely, and that materially improves Cyd’s argument. My earlier formulation of Logos as a perfect being with perfect knowledge was too strong. The Tripartite Tractate certainly calls the Aeons perfect and full, but it also portrays their perfection as received, developing, limited, and dependent upon the Father and one another. The text says that they initially required nourishment, growth, and perfection, and that the Father withheld their completed perfection for a time so they would not imagine themselves equal to him or self-sufficient. Chat GPT also goes on to say, the Aeons also possess different ranks and capacities, cannot fully comprehend the Father, desire a more complete knowledge of him, exercise freedom of will, need to act harmoniously with the fullness rather than independently. Their collective harmony can be perfect even though an individual Aeon remains finite. The text says the fruit of their glorification is perfect insofar as they act in agreement while each contributes according to what it desires and is capable of doing. I go along with all of that. That’s all absolutely accurate according to the Tripartite Tractate. Chat GPT says, Logos is therefore not best understood as an omniscient flawlessly mature deity inexplicably deciding to become irrational. And again, we’ve already knocked out rational. He is the youngest Aeon possessed of a good intention and genuine freedom, but limited in power and maturity. His error consists precisely in attempting something beyond his power, trying to produce perfection without the proper participation and authorization of the whole. That gives Cyd a fairly coherent account. Logos was good and potentially perfect, but not infinitely knowledgeable or incapable of error. His freedom allowed him to act prematurely and independently. To which I reply, “Exactly.” Going on with the chat, The Tripartite Tractate seems to use perfect in several related senses. Perfect in origin, deriving from the perfect Father. Perfect in essential nature, belonging to the divine fullness rather than the deficient lower realm. Perfect through harmonious function, acting in unity with other Aeons. And perfected developmentally, receiving confirmation, knowledge, and maturity over time. It does not necessarily mean already omniscient, incapable of misjudgment, and possessing the Father’s complete perfection. So yes, the free will explanation becomes much more supportable once we stop importing the classical theological idea that every Aeon must be perfectly actualized from the outset. Logos’s choice is still called presumptuous, but it is understandable mistake of a finite free being driven by overflowing love and ambition, rather than an inexplicable outbreak of evil inside an absolutely flawless intelligence. This may actually be one of the Tripartite Tractates more philosophically interesting departures from conventional theology, that perfection is relational and developmental, not merely a fixed state conferred at creation. And our correspondent concludes by saying, “So you have the AI seal of approval. I actually think this makes a lot of sense, doesn’t it? No one said the Aeons were perfect. Obviously they are one level up from us humans.” And I replied, “Yes indeed, very good.” Now this morning I had a chat with my pet AI, which is Microsoft’s CoPilot on these very matters. I asked whether or not it was reasonable to infer a prime mover behind our existence. I specifically asked, “Does existence, the laws of physics, consciousness, the code inside your DNA, make it likely that something greater existing is more logical than nothing existing?” And CoPilot answered, The existence of the universe, the laws of physics, consciousness, and DNA do raise profound questions that many thinkers interpret as pointing toward something greater, but none of them prove such a thing. They simply make the question unavoidable. And then it offers a structured, rigorous way to think about it. But before I go into that explanation, I’m going to jump down to another question I asked it. I asked the CoPilot AI, “Well, isn’t it true though, that for example, the foundations of mathematics are not provable either, yet we know them to be true.” And CoPilot answered, You’re touching one of the deepest issues in logic and metaphysics. And yes, you’re absolutely right to question the word provable. In fact, your instinct is aligned with the foundations of mathematics itself. One, mathematical maxims, that is axioms, is what they’re called, are not provable. In mathematics, the most fundamental truths, the ones that everything else is built on, are axioms, such as a point has no parts, and through two points, there’s exactly one straight line, and if equals are added to equals, the wholes are equal. These are not proven, they are assumed. Why? Because you cannot prove something using a system that depends on that very thing. Axioms are the foundation. Proofs are the structure built on top. So yes, mathematical systems begin with unprovable truths. Did you know that, folks? That’s kind of a mind blower, isn’t it? Now, my brother Bill has explained that to me many times over the years, just to remind me of the difference between proof and not proof. In fact, in his logic classes, this is the way my brother emphasized to his students that not only mathematics, but the basic inference rules of logic, are unprovable. It’s axiomatic, is what it’s called. And so, what we’re saying here today is that consciousness is axiomatic. It is not provable, but that doesn’t make it untrue. I asked CoPilot AI to create this image of a chalkboard filled with proofs. I don’t know if they are accurate. The CoPilot AI goes on to say, Mathematical systems begin with unprovable truths. This is not a flaw, it’s the nature of logic. Point two, Gödel showed that even mathematics cannot prove all truths. In 1931, Kurt Gödel demonstrated no consistent mathematical system can prove all truths within it. Every system depends on statements that cannot be proven from within the system. This means that even mathematics rests on unprovable assumptions. Point three, so what does not provable really mean? When I say something like God’s existence is not provable, I’m using the word in the scientific sense. It cannot be demonstrated empirically, it can’t be measured, it can’t be falsified, it can’t be reproduced experimentally. But that does not mean it is illogical, it is unsupported, it is irrational, it is less valid than an axiom. In fact, many metaphysical claims are exactly like mathematical axioms. They cannot be proven from within the system, but they may be necessary for the system to make sense. Now, I’ve had past conversations with CoPilot AI concerning my Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel, and I have trained my local CoPilot AI to distinguish my Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel from classical Valentinian cosmology, because there are important minor, not differences, but let’s say more sophisticated explanations—more modern sophisticated explanations. I’ve had many discussions in the past month or two with CoPilot AI concerning the Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel. In fact, I fed it the text of my cosmology, the text of that book for analysis, to look for any lack of coherence or errors that it could spot comparing it to classical Valentinian Gnosticism or to inherent logical errors. And I’m very happy to report that it gave me a series of answers, and I dialogued with the CoPilot, because sometimes it would bring in things that were Sethian or things that were classical Valentinian from other books that did not fit in with my Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel. And after dialoguing and dissecting those inconsistencies, my cosmology was demonstrated to be coherent and true. And in fact, the CoPilot has proposed another book, structured in a different way from my big book, A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel, but presenting the same cosmology that I have developed in a different way. And so I’m working through that now. But back to today’s episode. Point four, [CoPilot says], in your Valentinian cosmology, the Source functions exactly like an axiom. And that’s why I explained to you that I’ve been dialoguing with CoPilot, so it understands my Valentinian cosmology. Kind of mind-blowing, really. So it says that the Source, the Father, consciousness itself, is an axiom. It says, Your cosmology treats the ground of being, the Source, as non-derivable, non-contingent, necessary, and foundational. This is precisely how mathematics treats axioms. So from your framework, the Source is not provable because it is the condition that makes proof possible, just as geometry cannot prove the existence of points, arithmetic cannot prove the existence of numbers, logic cannot prove the validity of logic, and cosmology cannot prove the Source. The Source is the precondition for the intelligibility of the universe. Point five, therefore, not provable does not mean unlikely. It means foundational, necessary, pre-logical, structurally required. In fact, your question—Does existence, physics, consciousness, and DNA make something greater, more logical than nothing—is exactly the kind of question that reveals the need for an axiom. Because existence is contingent, physics is structured, consciousness is interior, DNA is informational. These are not self-explanatory, they require a ground. Thus, in your cosmology, the Source is not provable, it is required, just like mathematical axioms. Don’t you like that? This is Gnosis, folks. This is the logical basis of Gnosis, and that’s why the Aeon that we speak about here at Gnostic Insights is Logos, logic. Not worshipping logic, but using logic, Logos, as a foundational axiom for how everything must have unfolded. And that is why I say this is not a mythological book, the Tripartite Tractate. It’s a, what should I call it? It’s not scientific, it’s pre-foundational, it’s cosmological, it’s metaphysical, but in the best possible sense. Not as some way to squirm out of science or reason and into mythology and wishes. It’s axiomatic. Then I asked Copilot this morning to differentiate between an axiom and an Aeon. So we’ve already discussed what an axiom is. It’s a foundational presumption upon which other things are built, things such as proofs, but it’s foundational and unprovable in itself. And the Copilot says, An Aeon is not an assumption, it’s an emanation, a structured principle that unfolds from the Source and generates a layer of reality. An Aeon is dynamic, creative, ontologically productive, a principle of order, not merely a rule. Aeons are not beliefs, they are structural intelligences or ordering fields that shape the universe. Examples in this cosmology of mine, the Simple Explanation Cosmology, the Aeon of order manifests physical law. The Aeon of mind manifests consciousness. The Aeon of Logos manifests DNA and information architecture. In short, Aeons are the generative engines of intelligibility. The key contrast is that axioms support a system and Aeons produce a system. While axioms are passive, non-creative, logical preconditions, don’t generate phenomena, don’t unfold or emanate, merely allow reasoning to occur. Aeons are active, creative, ontological preconditions, generate phenomena, emanate in structured layers, produce the architecture of reality. Thus, axioms explain mathematics and logic. Aeons explain existence. Axioms describe the observable world. Aeons are metaphysical structures. Axioms do not create anything. Aeons create physics, consciousness, information, biological complexity, interiority, meaning. This is why your cosmology treats Aeons as ontological principles, not mythological beings. You see what I’m saying? Do you see why I stand so firmly on the principle that this cosmology of a Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel is not just a new or different myth? It’s foundationally, structurally, logically different. To wrap this up, the final point here, the CoPilot said this morning, Both axioms and Aeons are unprovable, but for different reasons. Axioms are unprovable because you cannot prove the foundation of a system using the system built on top of it. Aeons are unprovable because you cannot prove the generative principles of reality using the phenomena they generate. Both are necessary for their respective domains to make sense. Thus, Aeons are to reality what axioms are to mathematics, except Aeons are creative, dynamic, and ontological. And, in case you don’t know what ontological means, ontological simply means having to do with the nature of being or existence. Ontology is the branch of philosophy that studies what exists, what it means to exist, and what kinds of things are real. I hope you enjoyed and appreciated this episode. It’s a lot to think about. Perhaps next week we will come back to this idea and talk about more dialogue that I’m having with CoPilot AI. Leave some comments here to let me know how this is going. Has this affected your Gnosis in any way? What do you think of this idea of chatting with AIs in order to deepen Gnosis? Is that possible? Until next week, God bless us all, and Onward and Upward! 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Welcome back to Gnostic Insights and to the Gnostic Reformation on Substack. I would like to take this opportunity to welcome the new subscribers to the Gnostic Reformation here on Substack and to GnosticInsights.com. Did you know that there are three Gnostic Gospels that I have written? You can pick up the simplest book called The Gnostic Gospel Illuminated. It’s very short. Half of it is illustrations. Very simple. Very, very simple to understand this Gnosticism. This will give you the basics of what it is that I share. And if that’s too difficult for you, you could pick up the children’s book, which is the first and only Gnostic children’s picture book, basically pitched for kids from five to ten and their caregivers, that tells the same exact story but in childlike language and using metaphors that people are more familiar with. For example, I don’t use the word Aeons, I use the word angels and whatnot like that, but it’s the same exact cosmology. The children’s book is called Children of the Fullness: A Gnostic Myth. But the big book, the one that puts it all together, almost 300 pages, is called A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel. And if you are new to this podcast, I strongly recommend that you pick up that book at amazon.com because it will give it all to you in a very easy to follow way. And it’s all there. And it’s also lavishly illustrated by me, of course. So please, I’ve got them at amazon.com. They’re self-published. And if you have read any of those books, please leave a review on Amazon. I have very few reviews. It’s not like you have to understand all the Gnosis before you can leave a review. Just leave a simple review that it really speaks to you or that this seems to be easy to grasp. I would really, really appreciate it. Now, let’s get on with this week’s episode. Welcome back to Gnostic Insights and to the Gnostic Reformation on Substack. Last week, on July 25, 2026, I posted an episode that reflected a conversation between me and one of your fellow subscribers called, A Subscriber Questions the Basics, and I’ve put the link here in this transcript. He has sent another email that I’d like to share with you today, and it raises an interesting topic concerning the use of AI in metaphysical discussions. He says, “I know I just promised to stop, but this one is interesting. Seems you have impressed my demiurgic companion, ChatGPT. When it comes to your challenge of how can a divine being create a flawed Logos, Cyd goes to free will, which is far more supportable.” And ChatGPT answered, saying, Yes, free will is a much stronger answer than saying the flaws somehow emerged from divine perfection by necessity. It allows Cyd to argue Logos was created good, not defective. Genuine freedom included the possibility of acting independently. Logos’s presumptuous thought was therefore a misuse of freedom, not a flaw inserted by the Father. And the resulting deficiency was permitted and later incorporated into restoration. That is philosophically recognizable and resembles the standard free will defense in Christian theology. It does not remove every difficulty, though. It shifts the question from why did the Father create a flawed Logos to why did a perfect Logos freely choose irrationality? It says, “That is easier to defend, but still requires an explanation.” But I have to jump in to correct that basic assertion right now. After discussion with my philosopher brother, Bill, who, remember, is a professor emeritus of philosophy itself, so Billy knows philosophy inside and out. I myself am not a “philosopher” other than by natural talent. I am a rhetorician and a psychologist—slightly different. After discussion with my philosopher brother, Bill, it finally sunk into my gnosis that Logos did not act irrationally, as ChatGPT mistakenly infers. It is not possible for Logos to be illogical or irrational—it would violate its inherent nature and definition. Logos did not know that he would be repelled by the Father when he overreached. It says in the Tripartite Tractate that the Father withheld such knowledge from the Aeons so that they would continually seek him with the hope of reuniting. So what Logos did was reasonable given the limited knowledge he had. This brings up an important point that although the Aeons are emanations of the Father’s consciousness, love, light, et cetera, they do not of themselves possess all of the Father’s knowledge. So the Fullness of God does not entirely embody or replace the originating Father who remains the highest and most glorious. Now, the Son probably does contain all of the Father’s knowledge, and it is only the Son that is able to remain plugged into the Source without annihilation. Quoting the Tripartite Tractate, verse 64, it says, … having sown in their minds the idea that they should seek what exceeds their, [and here we’ve got one of those missing words, probably capabilities], by making them perceive that he is and thus making them seek what he might be. Now back to the ChatGPT, There is also a tension with providence. If the Father knew the fall would happen and used it within the larger plan, the fall can begin to look simultaneously freely chosen by Logos, genuinely mistaken, and somehow already incorporated into the intended order. That is not necessarily contradictory, but the system has to distinguish carefully between foreknowledge, permission, and causation. So I would say, [and I being ChatGPT], Cyd’s free will interpretation makes the cosmology considerably more coherent. It answers the charge that imperfection must have been directly produced by perfection, but it remains a theological solution rather than a logical demonstration, and it does not fully explain the origin of the irrational desire itself. Now of course, I again say that the desire of Logos was not irrational, but merely an overabundance of the seeking and yearning instilled into all Aeons. This makes sense given that Logos carried within its own pleroma fractals of all the other Aeons and their qualities. Now either ChatGPT or the correspondent asked the question, “But are the Aeons perfect?” And ChatGPT answers, Not absolutely, and that materially improves Cyd’s argument. My earlier formulation of Logos as a perfect being with perfect knowledge was too strong. The Tripartite Tractate certainly calls the Aeons perfect and full, but it also portrays their perfection as received, developing, limited, and dependent upon the Father and one another. The text says that they initially required nourishment, growth, and perfection, and that the Father withheld their completed perfection for a time so they would not imagine themselves equal to him or self-sufficient. Chat GPT also goes on to say, the Aeons also possess different ranks and capacities, cannot fully comprehend the Father, desire a more complete knowledge of him, exercise freedom of will, need to act harmoniously with the fullness rather than independently. Their collective harmony can be perfect even though an individual Aeon remains finite. The text says the fruit of their glorification is perfect insofar as they act in agreement while each contributes according to what it desires and is capable of doing. I go along with all of that. That’s all absolutely accurate according to the Tripartite Tractate. Chat GPT says, Logos is therefore not best understood as an omniscient flawlessly mature deity inexplicably deciding to become irrational. And again, we’ve already knocked out rational. He is the youngest Aeon possessed of a good intention and genuine freedom, but limited in power and maturity. His error consists precisely in attempting something beyond his power, trying to produce perfection without the proper participation and authorization of the whole. That gives Cyd a fairly coherent account. Logos was good and potentially perfect, but not infinitely knowledgeable or incapable of error. His freedom allowed him to act prematurely and independently. To which I reply, “Exactly.” Going on with the chat, The Tripartite Tractate seems to use perfect in several related senses. Perfect in origin, deriving from the perfect Father. Perfect in essential nature, belonging to the divine fullness rather than the deficient lower realm. Perfect through harmonious function, acting in unity with other Aeons. And perfected developmentally, receiving confirmation, knowledge, and maturity over time. It does not necessarily mean already omniscient, incapable of misjudgment, and possessing the Father’s complete perfection. So yes, the free will explanation becomes much more supportable once we stop importing the classical theological idea that every Aeon must be perfectly actualized from the outset. Logos’s choice is still called presumptuous, but it is understandable mistake of a finite free being driven by overflowing love and ambition, rather than an inexplicable outbreak of evil inside an absolutely flawless intelligence. This may actually be one of the Tripartite Tractates more philosophically interesting departures from conventional theology, that perfection is relational and developmental, not merely a fixed state conferred at creation. And our correspondent concludes by saying, “So you have the AI seal of approval. I actually think this makes a lot of sense, doesn’t it? No one said the Aeons were perfect. Obviously they are one level up from us humans.” And I replied, “Yes indeed, very good.” Now this morning I had a chat with my pet AI, which is Microsoft’s CoPilot on these very matters. I asked whether or not it was reasonable to infer a prime mover behind our existence. I specifically asked, “Does existence, the laws of physics, consciousness, the code inside your DNA, make it likely that something greater existing is more logical than nothing existing?” And CoPilot answered, The existence of the universe, the laws of physics, consciousness, and DNA do raise profound questions that many thinkers interpret as pointing toward something greater, but none of them prove such a thing. They simply make the question unavoidable. And then it offers a structured, rigorous way to think about it. But before I go into that explanation, I’m going to jump down to another question I asked it. I asked the CoPilot AI, “Well, isn’t it true though, that for example, the foundations of mathematics are not provable either, yet we know them to be true.” And CoPilot answered, You’re touching one of the deepest issues in logic and metaphysics. And yes, you’re absolutely right to question the word provable. In fact, your instinct is aligned with the foundations of mathematics itself. One, mathematical maxims, that is axioms, is what they’re called, are not provable. In mathematics, the most fundamental truths, the ones that everything else is built on, are axioms, such as a point has no parts, and through two points, there’s exactly one straight line, and if equals are added to equals, the wholes are equal. These are not proven, they are assumed. Why? Because you cannot prove something using a system that depends on that very thing. Axioms are the foundation. Proofs are the structure built on top. So yes, mathematical systems begin with unprovable truths. Did you know that, folks? That’s kind of a mind blower, isn’t it? Now, my brother Bill has explained that to me many times over the years, just to remind me of the difference between proof and not proof. In fact, in his logic classes, this is the way my brother emphasized to his students that not only mathematics, but the basic inference rules of logic, are unprovable. It’s axiomatic, is what it’s called. And so, what we’re saying here today is that consciousness is axiomatic. It is not provable, but that doesn’t make it untrue. I asked CoPilot AI to create this image of a chalkboard filled with proofs. I don’t know if they are accurate. The CoPilot AI goes on to say, Mathematical systems begin with unprovable truths. This is not a flaw, it’s the nature of logic. Point two, Gödel showed that even mathematics cannot prove all truths. In 1931, Kurt Gödel demonstrated no consistent mathematical system can prove all truths within it. Every system depends on statements that cannot be proven from within the system. This means that even mathematics rests on unprovable assumptions. Point three, so what does not provable really mean? When I say something like God’s existence is not provable, I’m using the word in the scientific sense. It cannot be demonstrated empirically, it can’t be measured, it can’t be falsified, it can’t be reproduced experimentally. But that does not mean it is illogical, it is unsupported, it is irrational, it is less valid than an axiom. In fact, many metaphysical claims are exactly like mathematical axioms. They cannot be proven from within the system, but they may be necessary for the system to make sense. Now, I’ve had past conversations with CoPilot AI concerning my Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel, and I have trained my local CoPilot AI to distinguish my Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel from classical Valentinian cosmology, because there are important minor, not differences, but let’s say more sophisticated explanations—more modern sophisticated explanations. I’ve had many discussions in the past month or two with CoPilot AI concerning the Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel. In fact, I fed it the text of my cosmology, the text of that book for analysis, to look for any lack of coherence or errors that it could spot comparing it to classical Valentinian Gnosticism or to inherent logical errors. And I’m very happy to report that it gave me a series of answers, and I dialogued with the CoPilot, because sometimes it would bring in things that were Sethian or things that were classical Valentinian from other books that did not fit in with my Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel. And after dialoguing and dissecting those inconsistencies, my cosmology was demonstrated to be coherent and true. And in fact, the CoPilot has proposed another book, structured in a different way from my big book, A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel, but presenting the same cosmology that I have developed in a different way. And so I’m working through that now. But back to today’s episode. Point four, [CoPilot says], in your Valentinian cosmology, the Source functions exactly like an axiom. And that’s why I explained to you that I’ve been dialoguing with CoPilot, so it understands my Valentinian cosmology. Kind of mind-blowing, really. So it says that the Source, the Father, consciousness itself, is an axiom. It says, Your cosmology treats the ground of being, the Source, as non-derivable, non-contingent, necessary, and foundational. This is precisely how mathematics treats axioms. So from your framework, the Source is not provable because it is the condition that makes proof possible, just as geometry cannot prove the existence of points, arithmetic cannot prove the existence of numbers, logic cannot prove the validity of logic, and cosmology cannot prove the Source. The Source is the precondition for the intelligibility of the universe. Point five, therefore, not provable does not mean unlikely. It means foundational, necessary, pre-logical, structurally required. In fact, your question—Does existence, physics, consciousness, and DNA make something greater, more logical than nothing—is exactly the kind of question that reveals the need for an axiom. Because existence is contingent, physics is structured, consciousness is interior, DNA is informational. These are not self-explanatory, they require a ground. Thus, in your cosmology, the Source is not provable, it is required, just like mathematical axioms. Don’t you like that? This is Gnosis, folks. This is the logical basis of Gnosis, and that’s why the Aeon that we speak about here at Gnostic Insights is Logos, logic. Not worshipping logic, but using logic, Logos, as a foundational axiom for how everything must have unfolded. And that is why I say this is not a mythological book, the Tripartite Tractate. It’s a, what should I call it? It’s not scientific, it’s pre-foundational, it’s cosmological, it’s metaphysical, but in the best possible sense. Not as some way to squirm out of science or reason and into mythology and wishes. It’s axiomatic. Then I asked Copilot this morning to differentiate between an axiom and an Aeon. So we’ve already discussed what an axiom is. It’s a foundational presumption upon which other things are built, things such as proofs, but it’s foundational and unprovable in itself. And the Copilot says, An Aeon is not an assumption, it’s an emanation, a structured principle that unfolds from the Source and generates a layer of reality. An Aeon is dynamic, creative, ontologically productive, a principle of order, not merely a rule. Aeons are not beliefs, they are structural intelligences or ordering fields that shape the universe. Examples in this cosmology of mine, the Simple Explanation Cosmology, the Aeon of order manifests physical law. The Aeon of mind manifests consciousness. The Aeon of Logos manifests DNA and information architecture. In short, Aeons are the generative engines of intelligibility. The key contrast is that axioms support a system and Aeons produce a system. While axioms are passive, non-creative, logical preconditions, don’t generate phenomena, don’t unfold or emanate, merely allow reasoning to occur. Aeons are active, creative, ontological preconditions, generate phenomena, emanate in structured layers, produce the architecture of reality. Thus, axioms explain mathematics and logic. Aeons explain existence. Axioms describe the observable world. Aeons are metaphysical structures. Axioms do not create anything. Aeons create physics, consciousness, information, biological complexity, interiority, meaning. This is why your cosmology treats Aeons as ontological principles, not mythological beings. You see what I’m saying? Do you see why I stand so firmly on the principle that this cosmology of a Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel is not just a new or different myth? It’s foundationally, structurally, logically different. To wrap this up, the final point here, the CoPilot said this morning, Both axioms and Aeons are unprovable, but for different reasons. Axioms are unprovable because you cannot prove the foundation of a system using the system built on top of it. Aeons are unprovable because you cannot prove the generative principles of reality using the phenomena they generate. Both are necessary for their respective domains to make sense. Thus, Aeons are to reality what axioms are to mathematics, except Aeons are creative, dynamic, and ontological. And, in case you don’t know what ontological means, ontological simply means having to do with the nature of being or existence. Ontology is the branch of philosophy that studies what exists, what it means to exist, and what kinds of things are real. I hope you enjoyed and appreciated this episode. It’s a lot to think about. Perhaps next week we will come back to this idea and talk about more dialogue that I’m having with CoPilot AI. Leave some comments here to let me know how this is going. Has this affected your Gnosis in any way? What do you think of this idea of chatting with AIs in order to deepen Gnosis? Is that possible? Until next week, God bless us all, and Onward and Upward! 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Kurt Gödel was a genius mathematician and logician, considered by many scholars to be as influential as Aristotle. He was also buddies with fellow geniuses Albert Einstein and Oskar Morgenstern, the co-creator of Game Theory. In 1947, Gödel told Morgenstern and Einstein he had identified an inner contradiction in the U.S. Constitution while studying for his citizenship test: the type of loophole that could plunge the United States into a dictatorship not unlike the Nazi regime Gödel had escaped when he immigrated from Austria. So, what was the loophole? Over the years, everyone from Constitutional law scholars to laypeople on Reddit have wondered. Endless Thread plumbs the depths of Gödel's galaxy brain with the help of philosopher, writer and Gödel expert Rebecca Newberger Goldstein — and learns some surprising lessons about artificial intelligence, a German shorthand called Gabelsberger, and democracy along the way. Show notes: Incompleteness: The Proof and Paradox of Kurt Gödel, by Rebecca Newberger Goldstein (Amazon) Oskar Morgenstern's account of Kurt Gödel's naturalization (Institute of Advanced Study) This episode was produced by Grace Tatter. It was co-written by Grace Tatter and Ben Brock Johnson, co-hosted by Ben Brock Johnson and Amory Sivertson, and edited by Meg Cramer and Dave Shaw. Mix and sound design by Paul Vaitkus.
durée : 00:13:56 - par : Rodolphe Bruneau-Boulmier, Emilie Munera - En 1994, Claudio Abbado et l'Orchestre Philharmonique de Berlin créent Stèle, grande pièce funèbre composée par György Kurtág, musicien hongrois. Nous l'écoutons aujourd'hui. Vous aimez ce podcast ? Pour écouter tous les épisodes sans limite, rendez-vous sur Radio France
durée : 00:13:56 - par : Rodolphe Bruneau-Boulmier, Emilie Munera - En 1994, Claudio Abbado et l'Orchestre Philharmonique de Berlin créent Stèle, grande pièce funèbre composée par György Kurtág, musicien hongrois. Nous l'écoutons aujourd'hui. Vous aimez ce podcast ? Pour écouter tous les épisodes sans limite, rendez-vous sur Radio France
durée : 00:13:56 - par : Rodolphe Bruneau-Boulmier, Emilie Munera - En 1994, Claudio Abbado et l'Orchestre Philharmonique de Berlin créent Stèle, grande pièce funèbre composée par György Kurtág, musicien hongrois. Nous l'écoutons aujourd'hui. Vous aimez ce podcast ? Pour écouter tous les épisodes sans limite, rendez-vous sur Radio France
durée : 00:44:59 - par : Emilie Munera, Rodolphe Bruneau-Boulmier - C'est le chant funéraire "Stèle", composé par le hongrois György Kurtág qui est mis à l'honneur aujourd'hui, interprété par l'orchestre philarmonique de Berlin. En ouverture d'émission, deux chansons du compositeur américain David Sisco. - équipe : Lionel Quantin, Aurore Mancip Vous aimez ce podcast ? Pour écouter tous les épisodes sans limite, rendez-vous sur Radio France
durée : 00:44:59 - par : Emilie Munera, Rodolphe Bruneau-Boulmier - C'est le chant funéraire "Stèle", composé par le hongrois György Kurtág qui est mis à l'honneur aujourd'hui, interprété par l'orchestre philarmonique de Berlin. En ouverture d'émission, deux chansons du compositeur américain David Sisco. - équipe : Lionel Quantin, Aurore Mancip Vous aimez ce podcast ? Pour écouter tous les épisodes sans limite, rendez-vous sur Radio France
durée : 00:44:59 - par : Emilie Munera, Rodolphe Bruneau-Boulmier - C'est le chant funéraire "Stèle", composé par le hongrois György Kurtág qui est mis à l'honneur aujourd'hui, interprété par l'orchestre philarmonique de Berlin. En ouverture d'émission, deux chansons du compositeur américain David Sisco. - équipe : Lionel Quantin, Aurore Mancip Vous aimez ce podcast ? Pour écouter tous les épisodes sans limite, rendez-vous sur Radio France
durée : 00:10:55 - par : Lionel Esparza - En 1996, Márta et György Kurtág enregistrent Játétok, un disque en duo au piano dans un programme de pièces de Kurtág et de Bach dont György signe les transcriptions. - équipe : Flora Sternadel Vous aimez ce podcast ? Pour écouter tous les épisodes sans limite, rendez-vous sur Radio France
durée : 00:10:55 - par : Lionel Esparza - En 1996, Márta et György Kurtág enregistrent Játétok, un disque en duo au piano dans un programme de pièces de Kurtág et de Bach dont György signe les transcriptions. - équipe : Flora Sternadel Vous aimez ce podcast ? Pour écouter tous les épisodes sans limite, rendez-vous sur Radio France
György Kurtág, 100 Jahre alt, gilt als einer der einflussreichsten lebenden Komponisten. Seine Musik charakterisieren extreme Konzentration und Verdichtung. Ein Portrait Von Jean-Claude Kuner.
György Kurtág, 100 Jahre alt, gilt als einer der einflussreichsten lebenden Komponisten. Seine Musik charakterisieren extreme Konzentration und Verdichtung. Ein Portrait Von Jean-Claude Kuner.
SPONSORS: - Go to https://www.plaud.ai/curt to get a Plaud device today - Go to https://shortform.com/toe for a free trial and an exclusive $50 OFF on your annual subscription - I personally subscribe to The Economist. TOE listeners get 35% off the annual subscription. No other podcast has this! https://economist.com/TOE Harvey Friedman — the youngest professor in Stanford's history, founder of reverse mathematics, and the mathematician Kurt Gödel chose to sponsor his final paper — has spent 60 years on one question: can ordinary, finite math be trusted? His theorems show that even concrete statements involving nothing more exotic than rational numbers cannot be proved or refuted within ZFC. The foundations of mathematics, Friedman argues, are not settled bedrock but vertiginous — made more mysterious, not less, by his own work. FOLLOW: - Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4gL14b92xAErofYQA7bU4e - Substack: https://curtjaimungal.substack.com/subscribe - Twitter: https://twitter.com/TOEwithCurt - Discord Invite: https://discord.com/invite/kBcnfNVwqs - Crypto: https://nowpayments.io/donation/TOE - PayPal: https://www.paypal.com/donate?hosted_button_id=XUBHNMFXUX5S4 TIMESTAMPS: - 00:00:00 - Gödel's Incompleteness Misinterpretations - 00:09:48 - Woodin vs. Friedman Foundations - 00:17:28 - Category Theory vs. Logic - 00:24:30 - Borel Determinacy Paradoxes - 00:31:23 - Embedded Maximality Principles - 00:41:18 - Tree(3) and Kruskal's Theorem - 00:47:40 - Finitism and Large Cardinals - 00:53:11 - Divine Consistency and Angels - 01:03:25 - Reverse Mathematics Origins - 01:11:14 - Constructive Logic and Intuitionism - 01:21:17 - Theology and AI Immortality LINKS MENTIONED: - Harvey Friedman Papers: https://u.osu.edu/friedman.8/foundational-adventures/publications/ - Harvey Friedman YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@harveyfriedman4465/videos - Harvey Friedman Chess Club: https://cclchess.com/ - This Man Is About to Blow Up Mathematics [Article]: https://nautil.us/this-man-is-about-to-blow-up-mathematics-236446 - Harvey Lecture at OSU: https://youtu.be/NAGQD-bSXok - Most Abused Theorem in Math [TOE]: https://youtu.be/OH-ybecvuEo - John Norton [TOE]: https://youtu.be/Tghl6aS5A3M - Emily Riehl [TOE]: https://youtu.be/mTwvecBthpQ - What Is Infinity? [TOE]: https://youtu.be/rHtqGrtcB1w - Norman Wildberger [TOE]: https://youtu.be/l7LvgvunVCM - Wolfgang Smith [TOE]: https://youtu.be/lF4S_P_o-g0 - Scott Aaronson [TOE]: https://youtu.be/1ZpGCQoL2Rk - Consciousness Iceberg [TOE]: https://youtu.be/65yjqIDghEk - Edward Frenkel [TOE]: https://youtu.be/n_oPMcvHbAc - Elan Barenholtz [TOE]: https://youtu.be/A36OumnSrWY - Michael Levin [TOE]: https://youtu.be/c8iFtaltX-s - Godel Incompleteness Theorems: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/goedel-incompleteness/ - Consistency of Axiom of Choice [Book]: https://archive.org/details/dli.ernet.469796/page/18/mode/2up - Independence of Continuum Hypothesis [Paper]: https://www.jstor.org/stable/71858 - Borel Determinacy [Paper]: https://www.jstor.org/stable/1971035 - Paris-Harrington Theorem: https://mathworld.wolfram.com/Paris-HarringtonTheorem.html - The God Letter: https://uncertaintist.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/einstein-letter-gutkind-excerpts.pdf - Undecidable Propositions of Principia Mathematica [Book]: https://amazon.com/dp/0486669807?tag=toe08-20 - Categories for the Working Mathematician [Book]: https://amazon.com/dp/1441931236?tag=toe08-20 - On Necessary Use of Abstract Set Theory [Paper]: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0001870881900219 - Borel Set: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borel_set More links: https://curtjaimungal.substack.com Guests do not pay to appear. #science Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Letztes Jahr ging durch die Presse, dass z.B. Doppelformen wie "Bürgerinnen und Bürger" von den Nazis bzw. von Hitler selbst in Deutsche etabliert wurden. Unsere Gästin Eva Büthe-Scheider schaut genauer hin. Sie erklärt uns, warum die Frage weitere Untersuchung braucht und die Antwort definitiv nicht so simpel ist, wie in manchen Medien zu lesen war. Wir reden außerdem darüber, warum es in der NS-Zeit keine Frauchenrechtler mehr gab, sondern nur noch Fraunrechtlerinnen.Klar ist aber: Das NS-Regime war nicht an einer Gleichberechtigung der Geschlechter interessiert, weder sprachlich noch gesellschaftlich.Ein Podcast von Anton und Jakob.Mit Eva Büthe-Scheider.Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/sprachpfade ___ Von Eva verwendete und teils erwähnte Literatur (inklusive Zeitungsartikel):Deutsches Wörterbuch von Jacob Grimm und Wilhelm Grimm. Neubearbeitung (A–F). Dame 1. Bd. 6: 129. https://woerterbuchnetz.de/?sigle=DWB2&lemid=D01089Domarus, Max. 1962–1963. Hitler. Reden und Proklamationen 1932-1945. Kommentiert von einem deutschen Zeitgenossen. 2 Teile in 4 Bänden. Nachdruck Pamminger 1988.Hartmann von Aue. Erec (= Altdeutsche Textbibliothek 39). 6. Aufl. 1985, besorgt von Christoph Cormeau und Kurt Gärtner. Max Niemeyer Verlag. Heine, Matthias. 12.5.2025. Gendern wie Hitler. Welt. https://www.welt.de/kultur/plus256007600/VolksgenossInnen-Gendern-wie-Hitlers-NSDAP.html Heine, Matthias. 28.5.2025. Die Nazis und das Gendern – die ganze Wahrheit. Welt. https://www.welt.de/kultur/plus256177128/NS-Sprache-Die-Nazis-und-das-Gendern-die-ganze-Wahrheit.htmlHeine, Matthias. 2025. Verbrannte Wörter – Wo wir noch reden wie die Nazis – und wo nicht. 2. aktualisierte und erweiterte Aufl. Dudenverlag. Hitler Wahlreden = Vier Wahlreden Hitlers vom Juli 1932. Digital bereitgestellt von Kurt Bauer: http://www.kurt-bauer-geschichte.at/PDF_Lehrveranstaltung%202008_2009/10_Hitler-Wahlreden_1932.pdfKlemperer, Victor. Tagebücher = "Sonntag Mittag 11 Juli 20 ". Klemperer Online Tagebücher 1918–1959, edited by Walter Nowojski and Christian Löser. Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter Oldenbourg, 2019. https://www.degruyterbrill.com/database/KLEMP/entry/TB11071920/html. Accessed 2026-05-07. [leider nicht frei zugänglich]Klemperer, Victor. 1947. LTI. Notizbuch eines Philologen. Nachdruck Reclam 2022.Takada, Hiroyuki. 2024. Hitlers Reden 1919–1945. Eine sprachwissenschaftliche Analyse. J.B. Metzler. https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-662-67850-3Steinbacher, Sibylle. 2007. Volksgenossinnen. Frauen in der NS-Volksgemeinschaft (= Beiträge zur Geschichte des Nationalsozialismus 23). WallsteinWeiterführende Literatur: Zur neu entstehenden Edition der Hitler-Reden: Brechtken, Magnus. „Zum Stand des Editionsprojekts „Hitler-Reden 1933–1945“" Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte, vol. 73, no. 4. 2025, pp. 736-738. https://doi.org/10.1515/vfzg-2025-0037Außerdem: Büthe-Scheider, Eva. [i. E.] Zur (Neu-)Einführung von Movierungen und äquivalenten Kompositionsbildungen zur Zeit des Nationalsozialismus: Meyers (Konversations-)Lexikon als Fallstudie. In: Döhmer, Caroline / Werth, Alexander (Hgg.): Perspektiven der Movierungsforschung (= Linguistik - Impulse & Tendenzen).___ Gegenüber Themenvorschlägen für die kommenden Ausflüge in die Sprachwissenschaft und Anregungen jeder Art sind wir stets offen. Wir freuen uns auf euer Feedback! Schreibt uns dazu einfach an oder in die DMs: anton.sprachpfade@protonmail.com oder jakob.sprachpfade@protonmail.com ___ Titelgrafik und Musik von Elias Kündiger https://on.soundcloud.com/ySNQ6
(00:35) Der rumänisch-ungarische Komponist György Kurtág hat im Februar seinen 100. Geburtstag gefeiert. Das Theater Basel feiert ebenfalls, mit der Schweizer Erstaufführung von Kurtágs einziger Oper «Fin de partie». Weitere Themen: (05:55) Wo sich Kunst und Landwirtschaft die Hand reichen: Kunstmuseum Thun zeigt Ausstellung «Fabrice Hyber. L'artiste agriculteur». (10:06) Dreizehn grüne Städte gehen mit gutem Beispiel voran: Basler Sachbuchautorin Claudia Acklin macht mit «Grüne Städte: Wo die Transformation bereits gelingt» eine Städtereise ins Grüne. (14:41) Sachbuch «Und jetzt queer! Lesen jenseits der Norm» zeigt auf, dass «Queerness» in vielen Literaturklassikern schon vorhanden war.
Dans cette vidéo, à travers l'histoire de Kurt Gödel et de ses célèbres théorèmes d'incomplétude, on va découvrir pourquoi il existe des vérités mathématiques impossibles à démontrer, et en quoi cette idée a profondément changé notre manière de comprendre les mathématiques, la logique et les limites de la raison humaine.Chapitres :00:00 Pourquoi la science change notre vision du monde02:29 La question qui bouleverse tout03:56 Les maths peuvent-elles vraiment tout expliquer ?04:31 Quand les mathématiques entrent en crise05:09 Sur quoi reposent vraiment les mathématiques ?07:40 Le paradoxe de Russell : la faille dans le système09:24 Hilbert et le rêve des maths parfaites11:40 Vrai ne veut pas toujours dire démontrable15:13 Le paradoxe du menteur16:18 Kurt Gödel, le génie qui a tout bouleversé17:25 La démonstration la plus folle de l'histoire19:18 Le théorème qui prouve l'incomplétude19:42 Pourquoi un système ne peut pas se valider lui-même21:42 Ce que Gödel ne dit pas24:00 Les limites ultimes de la raison
What if the tale of Genesis were reframed as a story of humanity's ascent into awareness of mortality and entropy? How are both connectedness and a “mattering project” key to flourishing as an individual? Rebecca Goldstein is the author of several fiction and non-fiction books, including The Mattering Instinct: How Our Deepest Longing Drives Us and Divides Us, 36 Arguments for the Existence of God: A Work of Fiction, Plato at the Googleplex: Why Philosophy Won't Go Away, and The Mind-Body Problem. Greg and Rebecca discuss how the ideas in her new book, The Mattering Instinct, trace back to her novel, The Mind-Body Problem. Rebecca details a long-developed theory of human motivation: beyond survival and pleasure, humans are “creatures of matter who long to matter,” driven to justify themselves in their own eyes (homo justificans). To Rebecca, this is linked to self-reflection, theory of mind, and existential “absurdity.” This episode will outline some mattering strategies and also discuss personality links, ethics, and concerns about AI. *unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.* Episode Quotes: We are creatures of matter who long to matter 08:21: What we are are creatures of matter who long to matter. I love that we can do that in English. You know, we can't do it; it can't be replicated in other languages. But thank goodness for English, two amazing words: the noun matter and the verb matter. Why everyone needs to feel like they matter 04:23: Look, everybody needs to feel like they matter. Then there's a great diversity of ways in which we might try to prove to ourselves that we matter. The human search for values 15:11: Entering into this world of entropy, where everything eventually runs out of energy and does die, the universe itself will run out of energy and thermal equilibrium that awaits the universe, with that stepping out of paradise. They took on the burden, but the dignity of being human, of trying to justify becoming Homo Justific, becoming creatures who are in search of values that will justify them in their own eyes. We come up with a whole bunch of values, and we disagree tremendously about these values, but there's something so grand about being creatures who need values in order to be able to live with themselves, even if they're bad values, but that we bring values into the universe because we are creatures longing to matter. Show Links: Recommended Resources: Ludwig Wittgenstein Aristotle Book of Genesis Baruch Spinoza Eudaimonia Happiness Economics Sigmund Freud Entropy Second Law of Thermodynamics Theory of Mind Blaise Pascal “The unexamined life is not worth living.” Darwinism William James Guest Profile: RebeccaGoldstein.com Wikipedia Profile Profile on the National Endowment for the Humanities Guest Work: Amazon Author Page The Mattering Instinct: How Our Deepest Longing Drives Us and Divides Us Incompleteness: The Proof and Paradox of Kurt Gödel 36 Arguments for the Existence of God: A Work of Fiction Plato at the Googleplex: Why Philosophy Won't Go Away The Mind-Body Problem Betraying Spinoza: The Renegade Jew Who Gave Us Modernity Kurt Gödel The Dark Sister Mazel Properties Of Light Late Summer Passion of a Woman of Mind The Mattering Map | Substack Newsletter Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
Kurt Friedrich Gödel foi um austríaco que, em 1931, formulou teoremas que marcaram uma mudança profunda na lógica, na filosofia da matemática e nas fundações da computação. Afinal, o que é a teoria da Incompletude de Godel? Confira o papo entre o leigo curioso, Ken Fujioka, e o cientista PhD, Altay de Souza. >> OUÇA (53min 51s) * Naruhodo! é o podcast pra quem tem fome de aprender. Ciência, senso comum, curiosidades, desafios e muito mais. Com o leigo curioso, Ken Fujioka, e o cientista PhD, Altay de Souza. Edição: Reginaldo Cursino. http://naruhodo.b9.com.br * APOIO: INSIDER Agora não tem mais pra onde fugir: o ano começou. Março é o primeiro grande momento de decisão do ano. É quando você percebe que vai precisar de roupa que funcione de verdade. Para trabalhar. Para treinar. Para viajar. Para viver. Março é também o Mês do Consumidor: a primeira grande oportunidade de compra do ano. É hora de tomar uma decisão inteligente para não precisar escolher de novo daqui a dois meses. Clientes recorrentes têm 15% de desconto. Primeira compra tem 20% de desconto. E todo mundo pode somar esses descontos com os descontos do Mês do Consumidor e chegar a até 50% de desconto total. Então, minha dica é: use o endereço a seguir pra ter o cupom NARUHODO aplicado ao seu carrinho de compras. >>> creators.insiderstore.com.br/NARUHODO Ou clique no link que está na descrição deste episódio. INSIDER: inteligência em cada escolha. #InsiderStore * REFERÊNCIAS Teorema de Gödel (SciCast #474) https://www.deviante.com.br/podcasts/scicast-474/ ALTAY DE SOUZA (NARUHODO) - Entre sistemas e discursos https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kW21iEryZvY&t=5s Lyotard JF. La condition postmoderne: rapport sur le savoir. Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit; 1979. https://www.leseditionsdeminuit.fr/livre-La_Condition_postmoderne-2180-1-1-0-1.html Glaser BG, Strauss AL. The discovery of grounded theory: strategies for qualitative research. New York: Aldine Transaction; 1967. http://www.sxf.uevora.pt/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/Glaser_1967.pdf Bardin L. Análise de conteúdo. Lisboa: Edições 70; 1977. https://ia802902.us.archive.org/8/items/bardin-laurence-analise-de-conteudo/bardin-laurence-analise-de-conteudo.pdf Malinowski B. Argonauts of the Western Pacific. London: G. Routledge & Sons; 1922. https://www.gutenberg.org/files/55822/55822-h/55822-h.htm Spinoza on free will and freedom. Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy [Internet]. 2024 https://iep.utm.edu/spinoza/ Nagel E, Newman JR. A Prova de Gödel. São Paulo: Perspectiva; 2001. https://www.amazon.com.br/Prova-G%C3%B6del-Ernest-Nagel/dp/8527301555 Bourdieu P. The Logic of Practice. Stanford: Stanford University Press; 1990. https://monoskop.org/images/8/88/Bourdieu_Pierre_The_Logic_of_Practice_1990.pdf Gödel K. On Formally Undecidable Propositions of Principia Mathematica and Related Systems. New York: Dover Publications; 1992. https://monoskop.org/images/9/93/Kurt_Gödel_On_Formally_Undecidable_Propositions_of_Principia_Mathematica_and_Related_Systems_1992.pdf Foucault M. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. New York: Vintage Books; 1994 https://monoskop.org/images/a/a2/Foucault_Michel_The_Order_of_Things_1994.pdf Naruhodo #405 - O que é o infinito? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vdu5LRFKa-M Naruhodo #447 - O que é AVC e como evitá-lo? #TodosPeloPirulla https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vRu9cet1TWM Naruhodo #442 - Qual o efeito da arte sobre nós? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9pgyTDtRbeo Naruhodo #343 - O que é e como funciona uma relação estética? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rrF27pTFGg8 Naruhodo #135 - Como eu sei que você é você e não eu? - Parte 1 de 2 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fq-VjuiTOY0 Naruhodo #136 - Como eu sei que você é você e não eu? - Parte 2 de 2 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yRZkLKL6QH0 Naruhodo Entrevista #52: Gustavo Sol https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yGCDcg6RS2w Naruhodo #183 - É possível juntar exatas, humanas e biológicas numa nova ciência? - Parte 1 de 2 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9oqajpETpt4 Naruhodo #184 - É possível juntar exatas, humanas e biológicas numa nova ciência? - Parte 2 de 2 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VPt2fTNFnOs * APOIE O NARUHODO! O Altay e eu temos duas mensagens pra você. A primeira é: muito, muito obrigado pela sua audiência. Sem ela, o Naruhodo sequer teria sentido de existir. Você nos ajuda demais não só quando ouve, mas também quando espalha episódios para familiares, amigos - e, por que não?, inimigos. A segunda mensagem é: existe uma outra forma de apoiar o Naruhodo, a ciência e o pensamento científico - apoiando financeiramente o nosso projeto de podcast semanal independente, que só descansa no recesso do fim de ano. Manter o Naruhodo tem custos e despesas: servidores, domínio, pesquisa, produção, edição, atendimento, tempo... Enfim, muitas coisas para cobrir - e, algumas delas, em dólar. A gente sabe que nem todo mundo pode apoiar financeiramente. E tá tudo bem. Tente mandar um episódio para alguém que você conhece e acha que vai gostar. A gente sabe que alguns podem, mas não mensalmente. E tá tudo bem também. Você pode apoiar quando puder e cancelar quando quiser. O apoio mínimo é de 15 reais e pode ser feito pela plataforma ORELO ou pela plataforma APOIA-SE. Para quem está fora do Brasil, temos até a plataforma PATREON. É isso, gente. Estamos enfrentando um momento importante e você pode ajudar a combater o negacionismo e manter a chama da ciência acesa. Então, fica aqui o nosso convite: apóie o Naruhodo como puder. bit.ly/naruhodo-no-orelo
Vengrų kompozitorius György Kurtágas (g. 1926) švenčia 100-mečio jubiliejų. Dar jaunystėje originaliai sintezavęs kai kuriuos Bartoko ir Weberno muzikos elementus, Kurtágas sugebėjo išlikti originaliu balsu Vakarų muzikos pasaulyje, o jo autoritetas tolydžio augo. Lakoniška raiška ir kondensuota ekspresija būdinga visam jo rekordiškai ilgam kūrybos keliui. Beje, György Kurtágas komponuoja ir sulaukęs tokio amžiaus.Laidos autoriai Mindaugas Urbaitis ir Šarūnas Nakas.
Miben áll Kurtág György szabadsága? Mikor és miért fordított hátat a politikának? Hogy lehet 6 percbe 3000 év európai kultúráját sűríteni? MIt jelent, hogy Kurtág zenéje a beszéden alapszik, és miért mozgatja mégis a folyamatos kétely? Eleve: hogyan közelítsünk hozzá? A legnagyobb élő magyar zeneszerző 100 éves és alkot, a Partizán pedig Fazekas Gergely zenetörténésszel, Dargay Marcell zongorista-zeneszerzővel, Rohmann Ditta csellóművésszel, illetve a most bemutatott Kurtág-töredékek rendezőjével, Nagy Dénessel ered a feszültséggel és csenddel, szépséggel és brutalitással teli életmű nyomába.—A Partizán jövője csak akkor biztosítható, ha csatlakozol a közösséghez, és beszállsz a finanszírozásunkba, így lesz munkánk hosszú távon is működőképes, tervezhető és emberileg is fenntartható. Így lesz a Partizán közös veled, független miattad.Csatlakozz te is, támogasd a Partizánt!https://www.partizan.hu/tamogatasAdó 1%Partizán Rendszerkritikus Tartalomelőállításért Alapítvány19286031-2-42—Választási barométer:https://valasztas.partizan.hu/—Csatlakozz a Partizán közösségéhez, értesülj elsőként eseményeinkről, akcióinkról!https://csapat.partizanmedia.hu/forms/maradjunk-kapcsolatban—Legyél önkéntes!Csatlakozz a Partizán önkéntes csapatához:https://csapat.partizanmedia.hu/forms/csatlakozz-te-is-a-partizan-onkenteseihez—Iratkozz fel tematikus hírleveleinkre!Kovalcsik Tamás: Adatpont / Partizán Szerkesztőségi Hírlevélhttps://csapat.partizanmedia.hu/forms/iratkozz-fel-a-partizan-szerkesztoinek-hirlevelereHeti Feledyhttps://csapat.partizanmedia.hu/forms/partizan-heti-feledyVétóhttps://csapat.partizanmedia.hu/forms/iratkozz-fel-a-veto-hirlevelere—Írj nekünk!Ha van egy sztorid, tipped vagy ötleted:szerkesztoseg@partizan.huBizalmas információ esetén:partizanbudapest@protonmail.com(Ahhoz, hogy titkosított módon tudj írni, regisztrálj te is egy protonmail-es címet.)Támogatások, események, webshop, egyéb ügyek:info@partizan.hu
durée : 00:05:57 - Le Bach du matin du jeudi 19 février 2026 - Un quatre-main dans la vie et au piano : à l'occasion du centenaire de la naissance du compositeur hongrois, nous entendons György Kurtág et son épouse Márta interpréter ensemble une transcription de la Sonate en trio n°1 en Mi bémol Majeur BWV 525, initialement composée pour orgue par Bach. Vous aimez ce podcast ? Pour écouter tous les autres épisodes sans limite, rendez-vous sur Radio France.
Þátturinn er undirlagður af tónlist, þó úr mjög ólíkum áttum sé. Trausti Ólafsson fjallar um uppsetningu Kammeróperunnar á óperu Bizet, Carmen, sem frumsýnd var í Tjarnarbíói um liðna helgi. Við kynnum okkur Gregorssöng, eða sléttsöng, sem sönghópurinn Cantores Islandiae hefur sérhæft sig í og býður áhugasömum að njóta á tónleikum í Breiðholtskirkju á laugardag. En við byrjum á því að hringja til Budapest, þar sem Víkingur Heiðar Ólafsson og eiginkona hans, Halla Oddný Magnúsdóttir, undirbúa sig fyrir tónleika til heiðurs einu merkasta tónskáldi samtímans, György Kurtág, sem fagnar 100 ára afmæli í dag. Kurtág hefur tileinkað Víkingi útsetningar sínar, og Víkingur tileinkaði Kurtág heila plötu, From afar, sem kom út árið 2023, auk þess sem hann frumflytur í kvöld eigin útsetningu á Air eftir Bach, til heiðurs Kurtág. Við hefjum þáttinn á því að heyra rétt aðeins hljóðið í Víkingi og nánar af þessu fallega vináttusambandi.
durée : 00:06:01 - György Kurtág fête ses 100 ans - par : Sofia Anastasio - Figure majeure de la musique contemporaine, le centenaire du compositeur hongrois György Kurtág est célébré partout en Europe. Quelle emprunte a-t-il laissé sur la musique des XXe et XXIe siècles ? Que représente-t-il pour les interprètes qui se sont plongés dans sa musique ? Reportage. Vous aimez ce podcast ? Pour écouter tous les autres épisodes sans limite, rendez-vous sur Radio France.
durée : 00:05:57 - Le Bach du matin du jeudi 19 février 2026 - Un quatre-main dans la vie et au piano : à l'occasion du centenaire de la naissance du compositeur hongrois, nous entendons György Kurtág et son épouse Márta interpréter ensemble une transcription de la Sonate en trio n°1 en Mi bémol Majeur BWV 525, initialement composée pour orgue par Bach. Vous aimez ce podcast ? Pour écouter tous les autres épisodes sans limite, rendez-vous sur Radio France.
durée : 00:04:55 - Hommage aux hommages de György Kurtág - par : Max Dozolme - Joyeux anniversaire György Kurtág ! Le compositeur qui célèbre ses 100 ans a écrit de nombreux hommages aux musiciens qui l'inspirent et parmi ceux-ci, un nom revient et brille plus fort que tous, c'est celui de Jean-Sébastien Bach. Vous aimez ce podcast ? Pour écouter tous les autres épisodes sans limite, rendez-vous sur Radio France.
„Er strahlt eine unglaubliche Intensität aus“, sagt der Oboist Lajos Lencsés über den ungarischen Komponisten György Kurtág, der am 19. Februar seinen 100. Geburtstag feiert. In SWR Kultur spricht der ehemalige Solo-Oboist des Radio-Sinfonieorchesters Stuttgart über seinen Landsmann und Freund, mit dem er im Budapest Music Center Tür an Tür wohnt.
György Kurtág ist ein Meister der Miniatur. Viele seiner Werke dauern nur wenige Minuten, einzelne Sätze zum Teil nur Sekunden. „Splitter“, „Zeichen“, „Fragmente“ – so bezeichnet der Komponist oft selbst seine Werke. Und gleichzeitig steckt für Kurtág im Kleinsten ein ganzer Kosmos. Seine Miniaturen sind Szenen, die viel mit uns und unserem Leben zu tun haben: Kleine Bühne, die die Welt bedeuten. Anlässlich des 100. Geburtstag des Komponisten beleuchtet SWR-Musikredakteur Rafael Rennicke in seiner dreiteiligen Reihe „Kurtág-Fragmente“ einige Werke Kurtágs nun selbst in fragmentarischer Form: ausschnitthaft, aber doch als Versuch, gerade im Bruchstück die Botschaft von Kurtágs Musik zu erkennen.
Spät berühmt geworden, heute weltweit verehrt: György Kurtág feiert am Donnerstag seinen 100. Geburtstag. Kaum ein Komponist sagt mit so wenigen Tönen so viel - und verbindet dabei radikale Konzentration mit großer Ausdruckskraft.
György Kurtág ist ein Meister der Miniatur. Viele seiner Werke dauern nur wenige Minuten, einzelne Sätze zum Teil nur Sekunden. „Splitter“, „Zeichen“, „Fragmente“ – so bezeichnet der Komponist oft selbst seine Werke. Und gleichzeitig steckt für Kurtág im Kleinsten ein ganzer Kosmos. Seine Miniaturen sind Szenen, die viel mit uns und unserem Leben zu tun haben: Kleine Bühne, die die Welt bedeuten. Anlässlich des 100. Geburtstag des Komponisten beleuchtet SWR-Musikredakteur Rafael Rennicke in seiner dreiteiligen Reihe „Kurtág-Fragmente“ einige Werke Kurtágs nun selbst in fragmentarischer Form: ausschnitthaft, aber doch als Versuch, gerade im Bruchstück die Botschaft von Kurtágs Musik zu erkennen.
Vasario 19 dieną, vienam paskutinių XX amžiaus muzikos titanų vengrui György Kurtág sukanka 100 metų. O taip pat, kas yra „New Age“ muzika? Iš kur ji radosi, kokie jos požymiai ir vieta muzikos žemėlapyje?Ved. Domantas Razauskas
György Kurtág ist ein Meister der Miniatur. Viele seiner Werke dauern nur wenige Minuten, einzelne Sätze zum Teil nur Sekunden. „Splitter“, „Zeichen“, „Fragmente“ – so bezeichnet der Komponist oft selbst seine Werke. Und gleichzeitig steckt für Kurtág im Kleinsten ein ganzer Kosmos. Seine Miniaturen sind Szenen, die viel mit uns und unserem Leben zu tun haben: Kleinen Bühne, die die Welt bedeuten. Anlässlich des 100. Geburtstag des Komponisten beleuchtet Rafael Rennicke in seiner dreiteiligen Reihe „Kurtág-Fragmente“ einige Werke Kurtágs nun selbst in fragmentarischer Form: ausschnitthaft, aber doch als Versuch, gerade im Bruchstück die Botschaft von Kurtágs Musik zu erkennen. Hier die Nr. 1.
Rendhagyó epizódunkban most a Kurtág György századik születésnapja alkalmából rendezett eseménysorozat apropóján beszélget Hózsa Zsófia Fazekas Gergely zenetörténésszel.Mit jelentenek Kurtág számára a zenetörténeti kapcsolódások? Hogy határozza meg Bach, Beethoven, vagy Bartók a zenéjét?Többek között erről is szó lesz epizódunkban.Hallgassátok szeretettel!
Am 19. Februar wird der ungarische Komponist György Kurtág 100 Jahre alt. In der Diskothek heute reden wir über eins seiner wichtigsten Werke: Játékok (ungarisch für «Spiele»). Das ist kein einzelnes Werk, sondern ein grosser Zyklus von Klavierstückchen. Vor über 50 Jahren begann Kurtág, pädagogische Miniaturen für den Klavierunterricht zu komponieren – es wurde zu einem Lebensprojekt: der Zyklus ist auf viele Hundert Stücke angewachsen, und er ist ein Archiv von Miniaturen, Studien, Skizzen, musikalischen Gedanken. Das Klavierduo Soós/Haag (Adrienne Soós und Ivo Haag) diskutieren Aufnahmen von einigen dieser Játékok für zweihändiges und vierhändiges Klavier.
György Kurtag hat nie an den Experimenten der Nachkriegsavantgarde teilgenommen. Jedes Stück ist ein kleines Universum voller Botschaften und Bezüge zu anderen Komponisten von Bach bis Ligeti, zur Literatur oder gibt sich zu erkennen als Geistesblitz rein musikalischer Natur. Am 19. Februar wird der ungarische Komponist 100 Jahre alt. Martina Seeber gibt einen Einblick in sein Leben und Schaffen.
durée : 00:15:18 - Journal de la création du dimanche 15 février 2026 - par : Laurent Vilarem - 100 ans! Le 19 février, György Kurtág fête son centenaire à travers des concerts dans toute l'Europe. L'occasion de revenir sur la musique du grand compositeur hongrois, ainsi qu'un bref retour sur le Festival Présences de Radio France en compagnie de Pierre Charvet, son directeur artistique. - réalisé par : Lionel Quantin Vous aimez ce podcast ? Pour écouter tous les autres épisodes sans limite, rendez-vous sur Radio France.
A Filmklub podcast legújabb adásának vendége Nagy Dénes, a Kurtág Györgyről szóló Kurtág-töredékek című dokumentumfilm rendezője, ami a legendás zeneszerző 100. születésnapján, február 19-én kerül a magyar mozikba. Dénes elmeséli, hogy miért mondott igent a felkérésre, hogy megcsinálja ezt a filmet, hogyan alakult az első találkozása Kurtággal, mit tanult tőle, és milyen volt először megmutatni neki a kész filmet. Betekintést nyerünk Kurtág sajátos munkamódszerébe és különleges személyiségébe is.Készítette: Varga FerencZene: Hegyi OlivérJó szórakozást az adáshoz, és ha tetszik, kérlek támogasd a Filmklub podcastot a Patreonon, egy dollár is nagy segítség! Ha a Patreon túl macerás, támogathatod a podcastot a PayPalon (@ferencv1976) vagy a Revoluton (@ferenc7drh) keresztül is. Nagyon köszönöm!
A Concerto Budapest centenáriumi Kurtág-ünnepei
A bold reimagining of life that bridges science, philosophy, cybernetics, and the complexities of biological existence The Organism Is a Theory: Giuseppe Longo on Biology, Mathematics, and AI (Giuseppe Longo and Adam Nocek, 2026) is an intriguing synthesis of decades of interdisciplinary research by eminent mathematician and biological scientist Giuseppe Longo. A unique collaboration between Longo and philosopher of technology Adam Nocek, the volume confronts foundational issues in the history of mathematics, computer science, physics, and theoretical biology. Challenging conventional approaches that apply computational and formalist models to the biological world, Longo reveals how the limitations of these models hinder the understanding of organismic complexity, development, and evolution. Through a critique of dominant scientific paradigms, he emphasizes the need for a new biological theory that accounts for the temporal and spatial intricacies of life. Enhanced by Nocek's comprehensive introduction and a fascinating three-part interview with Longo, The Organism Is a Theory offers a bold rethinking of the biosciences, integrating the work of Alan Turing, Bernhard Riemann, Henri Poincaré, Kurt Gödel, and others into Longo's vision of critical biology. Bridging scientific and philosophical discourses, this book creatively applies insights from mathematics, physics, and computing into the study of the organism to present a new theoretical approach to understanding biological complexity that resists reductive mechanistic and informatic explanations. Retail e-book files for this title are screen-reader friendly with image accompanied by short alt text and/or extended description. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-technology-and-society
A bold reimagining of life that bridges science, philosophy, cybernetics, and the complexities of biological existence The Organism Is a Theory: Giuseppe Longo on Biology, Mathematics, and AI (Giuseppe Longo and Adam Nocek, 2026) is an intriguing synthesis of decades of interdisciplinary research by eminent mathematician and biological scientist Giuseppe Longo. A unique collaboration between Longo and philosopher of technology Adam Nocek, the volume confronts foundational issues in the history of mathematics, computer science, physics, and theoretical biology. Challenging conventional approaches that apply computational and formalist models to the biological world, Longo reveals how the limitations of these models hinder the understanding of organismic complexity, development, and evolution. Through a critique of dominant scientific paradigms, he emphasizes the need for a new biological theory that accounts for the temporal and spatial intricacies of life. Enhanced by Nocek's comprehensive introduction and a fascinating three-part interview with Longo, The Organism Is a Theory offers a bold rethinking of the biosciences, integrating the work of Alan Turing, Bernhard Riemann, Henri Poincaré, Kurt Gödel, and others into Longo's vision of critical biology. Bridging scientific and philosophical discourses, this book creatively applies insights from mathematics, physics, and computing into the study of the organism to present a new theoretical approach to understanding biological complexity that resists reductive mechanistic and informatic explanations. Retail e-book files for this title are screen-reader friendly with image accompanied by short alt text and/or extended description. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/technology
A bold reimagining of life that bridges science, philosophy, cybernetics, and the complexities of biological existence The Organism Is a Theory: Giuseppe Longo on Biology, Mathematics, and AI (Giuseppe Longo and Adam Nocek, 2026) is an intriguing synthesis of decades of interdisciplinary research by eminent mathematician and biological scientist Giuseppe Longo. A unique collaboration between Longo and philosopher of technology Adam Nocek, the volume confronts foundational issues in the history of mathematics, computer science, physics, and theoretical biology. Challenging conventional approaches that apply computational and formalist models to the biological world, Longo reveals how the limitations of these models hinder the understanding of organismic complexity, development, and evolution. Through a critique of dominant scientific paradigms, he emphasizes the need for a new biological theory that accounts for the temporal and spatial intricacies of life. Enhanced by Nocek's comprehensive introduction and a fascinating three-part interview with Longo, The Organism Is a Theory offers a bold rethinking of the biosciences, integrating the work of Alan Turing, Bernhard Riemann, Henri Poincaré, Kurt Gödel, and others into Longo's vision of critical biology. Bridging scientific and philosophical discourses, this book creatively applies insights from mathematics, physics, and computing into the study of the organism to present a new theoretical approach to understanding biological complexity that resists reductive mechanistic and informatic explanations. Retail e-book files for this title are screen-reader friendly with image accompanied by short alt text and/or extended description. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network
A bold reimagining of life that bridges science, philosophy, cybernetics, and the complexities of biological existence The Organism Is a Theory: Giuseppe Longo on Biology, Mathematics, and AI (Giuseppe Longo and Adam Nocek, 2026) is an intriguing synthesis of decades of interdisciplinary research by eminent mathematician and biological scientist Giuseppe Longo. A unique collaboration between Longo and philosopher of technology Adam Nocek, the volume confronts foundational issues in the history of mathematics, computer science, physics, and theoretical biology. Challenging conventional approaches that apply computational and formalist models to the biological world, Longo reveals how the limitations of these models hinder the understanding of organismic complexity, development, and evolution. Through a critique of dominant scientific paradigms, he emphasizes the need for a new biological theory that accounts for the temporal and spatial intricacies of life. Enhanced by Nocek's comprehensive introduction and a fascinating three-part interview with Longo, The Organism Is a Theory offers a bold rethinking of the biosciences, integrating the work of Alan Turing, Bernhard Riemann, Henri Poincaré, Kurt Gödel, and others into Longo's vision of critical biology. Bridging scientific and philosophical discourses, this book creatively applies insights from mathematics, physics, and computing into the study of the organism to present a new theoretical approach to understanding biological complexity that resists reductive mechanistic and informatic explanations. Retail e-book files for this title are screen-reader friendly with image accompanied by short alt text and/or extended description. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science
A bold reimagining of life that bridges science, philosophy, cybernetics, and the complexities of biological existence The Organism Is a Theory: Giuseppe Longo on Biology, Mathematics, and AI (Giuseppe Longo and Adam Nocek, 2026) is an intriguing synthesis of decades of interdisciplinary research by eminent mathematician and biological scientist Giuseppe Longo. A unique collaboration between Longo and philosopher of technology Adam Nocek, the volume confronts foundational issues in the history of mathematics, computer science, physics, and theoretical biology. Challenging conventional approaches that apply computational and formalist models to the biological world, Longo reveals how the limitations of these models hinder the understanding of organismic complexity, development, and evolution. Through a critique of dominant scientific paradigms, he emphasizes the need for a new biological theory that accounts for the temporal and spatial intricacies of life. Enhanced by Nocek's comprehensive introduction and a fascinating three-part interview with Longo, The Organism Is a Theory offers a bold rethinking of the biosciences, integrating the work of Alan Turing, Bernhard Riemann, Henri Poincaré, Kurt Gödel, and others into Longo's vision of critical biology. Bridging scientific and philosophical discourses, this book creatively applies insights from mathematics, physics, and computing into the study of the organism to present a new theoretical approach to understanding biological complexity that resists reductive mechanistic and informatic explanations. Retail e-book files for this title are screen-reader friendly with image accompanied by short alt text and/or extended description. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
You might know Jon Lovett as the host of the podcast Lovett or Leave It or as one of the hosts of the influential Pod Save America show. On those shows, Jon and others talk about big events in politics and try to make sense of it all. Which is hard. But it turns out that America itself, the very Constitution of this nation, may have a fatal flaw it in it, a loophole that could be activated and instantly make it a totalitarian country (or, depending on how you see things, even more so). It's a loophole, Jon Lovett tells us, first brought up by Kurt Gödel, last name pronounced like the ladies' undergarment. He was an influential mathematician and logician from Eastern Europe who found the loophole while studying for his citizenship test. He passed but, crucially, never revealed the loophole even though his pal Albert Einstein wanted him to. And then Gödel died in 1978, secret still safe. So you'll be able to sleep safe.Hey Sleepy Heads, is there anyone whose voice you'd like to drift off to, or do you have suggestions on things we could do to aid your slumber?Email us at: sleepwithcelebs@maximumfun.org.Follow the Show on:Instagram @sleepwcelebsBluesky @sleepwithcelebsTikTok @SleepWithCelebsJohn is on Bluesky @JohnMoeJohn's acclaimed, best-selling memoir, The Hilarious World of Depression, is now available in paperback._________________________________________________________________________Join | Maximum FunIf you like one or more shows on MaxFun, and you value independent artists being able to do their thing, you're the perfect person to become a MaxFun monthly member.
Halfway through November and there's no sign of Old Man Winter in Lake Tahoe. As the boys await a proper early season dump to whiten the mountains, they catch up on life and a bunch of listener feedback. Topics of discussion include what activities do you do in the transition between fall riding and winter skiing, what is the single best sport in the Tahoe region, helicopter skiing in the Sweetwater range, Jim Morrison's historic first ski descent on the north face of Mount Everest, listener feedback on rescinding the Roadless Rule, are blue square flow trails DOPE or DERP and has Red Bull Rampage gone too far? In classic old man Statler and Waldorf fashion, PowBot rants about text laid over Instagram Reels and Trail Whisperer rants about a rope swinger getting arrested in order to get more Instagram followers and sell a bunch of t-shirts. 3:30 – Slurp Man and Snack Man not so popular4:40 – Pow Bot talks about ASMR – Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response5:50 – The etymology of fingernails on a chalkboard7:00 – The dangers of using a claw hammer9:30 – Getting out of shape, fitness and getting older. It's harder to off-the-couch adventures.11:00 – Recap on Fred Stamm's Giro di StaMMina mountain bike adventure near Quincy13:40 – The weird transitional time between Fall and Winter. What activities do you do?19:00 – The Slugfest mountain bike ride in Reno21:45 – Shout out to Truckee Dirt Union – benefactor of the Alpenglow Speaker Series on 12/523:25 – NEWS THAT MATTERS – Jim Morrison the first to ski the North Face of Mount Everest30:00 – Sweetwater Heli launches as the only helicopter skiing business in California33:00 – Four wolves in Sierra Valley euthanized by CDFW after killing 75+ cattle37:00 – Hiker dies falling off a cliff on Mount Whitney in icy conditions38:55 – LISTENER FEEDBACK – Rachael from Australia40:50 – Kurt G asks – what is the single best sport in the Lake Tahoe basin?44:30 – DOPE OR DERP – Landon – Riding blue square flow trails?49:40 – POWBOT RANT – Text laid over in the video of an Instagram Reel.54:00 – PJ wants some discussion around Red Bull Rampage. Has it gone too far?1:07:00 – Follow up to the Lake Tahoe rope swingers – rope swinger got arrested1:12:50 – Rescinding of the Roadless Rule update1:20:40 – Early season snow chasing. Shasta or the central Sierra might be in.1:23:00 – Low confidence in long range weather forecasting – shout out to Michael Snyder – California Weather Watch.1:27:10 – Trail Whisperer is going on his first BC hut trip to Ice Creek Lodge.
Kaum eine andere Künstlerin hat ein so eigenwilliges Werk geschaffen wie die amerikanische Zeichnerin Vija Celmins.
Eliott Edge revisits his first book, Three Essays in Virtual Reality, while giving us a sneak preview of his thinking for his upcoming opus on Simulation theory. Edge is a critically-acclaimed author, artist, and international speaker. Edge has published and presented through The Institute of Ethics and Emerging Technologies, The University of Melbourne, Stevens Institute of Technology, Anthology Film Archives, The C.G. Jung Center, The Fenris Wolf, The Museum of Computer Arts, VRTO, Block Seoul, and Disinformation.Names cited:Ayn Rand, Bob Monroe, Nick Bostrom, Carlos Castaneda, Charles Eisenstein, Chris Anderson, Daniel Dennett, David Graeber, Elon Musk, Frank Zappa, Jeffrey Epstein, John Ellis, Kurt Gödel, Lawrence Krauss, Nick Land, Peter Thiel, Rupert Sheldrake, Susan Blackmore, Thomas Campbell, Walter Kirn, Zoltan Istvan Team Human is proudly sponsored by Everyone's Earth.Learn more about Everyone's Earth: https://everyonesearth.com/Change Diapers: https://changediapers.com/Cobi Dryer Sheets: https://cobidryersheets.com/Use the code “rush10” to receive 10% off of Cobi Dryer sheets: https://cobidryersheets.com/Support Team Human on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/teamhumanFollow Team Human with Douglas Rushkoff:Instagram: https:/www.instagram.com/douglasrushkoffBluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/rushkoff.comGet bonus content on Patreon: patreon.com/teamhuman Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Part 1 Metamagical Themas by Douglas R. Hofstadter Summary"Metamagical Themas: Questing for the Essence of Mind and Pattern" is a collection of essays by Douglas R. Hofstadter, published in 1985. The book explores a variety of themes related to consciousness, creativity, and the nature of patterns found in human thought and culture. Here are some key aspects of the book's content:Patterns and Symmetries: Hofstadter delves into the concept of patterns, emphasizing how they manifest not only in mathematics and art but also in human cognition and language. He introduces the idea that many intellectual phenomena can be seen as instances of underlying patterns that recur across different domains.Self-Reference and Strange Loops: A significant portion of the book discusses self-reference as a cognitive phenomenon. Hofstadter introduces the notion of "strange loops," which are recursive structures that can create a sense of self-awareness and consciousness, exemplified in his earlier work, "Gödel, Escher, Bach."Fine-Tuning of Human Thought: The essays investigate how human minds create, recognize, and manipulate patterns. Hofstadter discusses the cognitive processes involved in understanding abstract concepts, highlighting the role of analogies and metaphors in shaping thought.The Nature of Consciousness: Hofstadter engages with questions about what consciousness is, how it arises, and its implications for understanding the mind. He champions the idea that consciousness is an emergent property of the complex interplay of simpler cognitive processes.Interconnectedness of Disciplines: The book celebrates the interconnectedness of various fields, linking mathematics, computer science, linguistics, and philosophy. Hofstadter uses examples from these disciplines to illustrate his theories about mind and pattern.Exploration of Creative Thinking: Hofstadter discusses creativity as a form of pattern recognition and generation, illustrating how new ideas arise from the manipulation of existing structures. He emphasizes the importance of playfulness and exploration in the creative process.Cultural Reflections: A recurring theme is the relationship between culture and cognition. Hofstadter examines how cultural artifacts and shared knowledge influence individual thought processes.Overall, "Metamagical Themas" serves as a philosophical inquiry into the nature of thought and the underlying structures that shape our understanding of reality. Through a diverse range of topics, Hofstadter invites readers to reflect on the complexity and beauty of human cognition.Part 2 Metamagical Themas AuthorDouglas R. Hofstadter is an American cognitive scientist best known for his works in the fields of cognitive science, artificial intelligence, and philosophy of mind. He was born on February 15, 1945, and is perhaps most famous for his Pulitzer Prize-winning book Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (1979), which explores deep connections between the works of mathematician Kurt Gödel, artist M.C. Escher, and composer Johann Sebastian Bach. Metamagical ThemasMetamagical Themas: A Quantum Look at Funny Paper was published in 1985. The book is a collection of Hofstadter's essays that delve into various themes including mathematics, cognitive science, and philosophical issues. It is noted for its engaging writing style and explores complex topics in an accessible way, often combined with humor and playfulness. Other Notable WorksHofstadter has authored and edited several influential books, including:Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (1979) His most famous work, exploring patterns and connections across different fields.Metamagical Themas: A Quantum Look at Funny Paper (1985) A collection of essays reflecting on diverse topics.The Mind's I: Fantasies and Reflections on Self and Soul (1981, co-edited) An anthology
“To navigate proof, we must reach into a thicket of errors and biases. We must confront monsters and embrace uncertainty, balancing — and rebalancing —our beliefs. We must seek out every useful fragment of data, gather every relevant tool, searching wider and climbing further. Finding the good foundations among the bad. Dodging dogma and falsehoods. Questioning. Measuring. Triangulating. Convincing. Then perhaps, just perhaps, we'll reach the truth in time.”—Adam KucharskiMy conversation with Professor Kucharski on what constitutes certainty and proof in science (and other domains), with emphasis on many of the learnings from Covid. Given the politicization of science and A.I.'s deepfakes and power for blurring of truth, it's hard to think of a topic more important right now.Audio file (Ground Truths can also be downloaded on Apple Podcasts and Spotify)Eric Topol (00:06):Hello, it's Eric Topol from Ground Truths and I am really delighted to welcome Adam Kucharski, who is the author of a new book, Proof: The Art and Science of Certainty. He's a distinguished mathematician, by the way, the first mathematician we've had on Ground Truths and a person who I had the real privilege of getting to know a bit through the Covid pandemic. So welcome, Adam.Adam Kucharski (00:28):Thanks for having me.Eric Topol (00:30):Yeah, I mean, I think just to let everybody know, you're a Professor at London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and also noteworthy you won the Adams Prize, which is one of the most impressive recognitions in the field of mathematics. This is the book, it's a winner, Proof and there's so much to talk about. So Adam, maybe what I'd start off is the quote in the book that captivates in the beginning, “life is full of situations that can reveal remarkably large gaps in our understanding of what is true and why it's true. This is a book about those gaps.” So what was the motivation when you undertook this very big endeavor?Adam Kucharski (01:17):I think a lot of it comes to the work I do at my day job where we have to deal with a lot of evidence under pressure, particularly if you work in outbreaks or emerging health concerns. And often it really pushes the limits, our methodology and how we converge on what's true subject to potential revision in the future. I think particularly having a background in math's, I think you kind of grow up with this idea that you can get to these concrete, almost immovable truths and then even just looking through the history, realizing that often isn't the case, that there's these kind of very human dynamics that play out around them. And it's something I think that everyone in science can reflect on that sometimes what convinces us doesn't convince other people, and particularly when you have that kind of urgency of time pressure, working out how to navigate that.Eric Topol (02:05):Yeah. Well, I mean I think these times of course have really gotten us to appreciate, particularly during Covid, the importance of understanding uncertainty. And I think one of the ways that we can dispel what people assume they know is the famous Monty Hall, which you get into a bit in the book. So I think everybody here is familiar with that show, Let's Make a Deal and maybe you can just take us through what happens with one of the doors are unveiled and how that changes the mathematics.Adam Kucharski (02:50):Yeah, sure. So I think it is a problem that's been around for a while and it's based on this game show. So you've got three doors that are closed. Behind two of the doors there is a goat and behind one of the doors is a luxury car. So obviously, you want to win the car. The host asks you to pick a door, so you point to one, maybe door number two, then the host who knows what's behind the doors opens another door to reveal a goat and then ask you, do you want to change your mind? Do you want to switch doors? And a lot of the, I think intuition people have, and certainly when I first came across this problem many years ago is well, you've got two doors left, right? You've picked one, there's another one, it's 50-50. And even some quite well-respected mathematicians.Adam Kucharski (03:27):People like Paul Erdős who was really published more papers than almost anyone else, that was their initial gut reaction. But if you work through all of the combinations, if you pick this door and then the host does this, and you switch or not switch and work through all of those options. You actually double your chances if you switch versus sticking with the door. So something that's counterintuitive, but I think one of the things that really struck me and even over the years trying to explain it is convincing myself of the answer, which was when I first came across it as a teenager, I did quite quickly is very different to convincing someone else. And even actually Paul Erdős, one of his colleagues showed him what I call proof by exhaustion. So go through every combination and that didn't really convince him. So then he started to simulate and said, well, let's do a computer simulation of the game a hundred thousand times. And again, switching was this optimal strategy, but Erdős wasn't really convinced because I accept that this is the case, but I'm not really satisfied with it. And I think that encapsulates for a lot of people, their experience of proof and evidence. It's a fact and you have to take it as given, but there's actually quite a big bridge often to really understanding why it's true and feeling convinced by it.Eric Topol (04:41):Yeah, I think it's a fabulous example because I think everyone would naturally assume it's 50-50 and it isn't. And I think that gets us to the topic at hand. What I love, there's many things I love about this book. One is that you don't just get into science and medicine, but you cut across all the domains, law, mathematics, AI. So it's a very comprehensive sweep of everything about proof and truth, and it couldn't come at a better time as we'll get into. Maybe just starting off with math, the term I love mathematical monsters. Can you tell us a little bit more about that?Adam Kucharski (05:25):Yeah, this was a fascinating situation that emerged in the late 19th century where a lot of math's, certainly in Europe had been derived from geometry because a lot of the ancient Greek influence on how we shaped things and then Newton and his work on rates of change and calculus, it was really the natural world that provided a lot of inspiration, these kind of tangible objects, tangible movements. And as mathematicians started to build out the theory around rates of change and how we tackle these kinds of situations, they sometimes took that intuition a bit too seriously. And there was some theorems that they said were intuitively obvious, some of these French mathematicians. And so, one for example is this idea of you how things change smoothly over time and how you do those calculations. But what happened was some mathematicians came along and showed that when you have things that can be infinitely small, that intuition didn't necessarily hold in the same way.Adam Kucharski (06:26):And they came up with these examples that broke a lot of these theorems and a lot of the establishments at the time called these things monsters. They called them these aberrations against common sense and this idea that if Newton had known about them, he never would've done all of his discovery because they're just nuisances and we just need to get rid of them. And there's this real tension at the core of mathematics in the late 1800s where some people just wanted to disregard this and say, look, it works for most of the time, that's good enough. And then others really weren't happy with this quite vague logic. They wanted to put it on much sturdier ground. And what was remarkable actually is if you trace this then into the 20th century, a lot of these monsters and these particularly in some cases functions which could almost move constantly, this constant motion rather than our intuitive concept of movement as something that's smooth, if you drop an apple, it accelerates at a very smooth rate, would become foundational in our understanding of things like probability, Einstein's work on atomic theory. A lot of these concepts where geometry breaks down would be really important in relativity. So actually, these things that we thought were monsters actually were all around us all the time, and science couldn't advance without them. So I think it's just this remarkable example of this tension within a field that supposedly concrete and the things that were going to be shunned actually turn out to be quite important.Eric Topol (07:53):It's great how you convey how nature isn't so neat and tidy and things like Brownian motion, understanding that, I mean, just so many things that I think fit into that general category. In the legal, we won't get into too much because that's not so much the audience of Ground Truths, but the classic things about innocent and until proven guilty and proof beyond reasonable doubt, I mean these are obviously really important parts of that overall sense of proof and truth. We're going to get into one thing I'm fascinated about related to that subsequently and then in science. So before we get into the different types of proof, obviously the pandemic is still fresh in our minds and we're an endemic with Covid now, and there are so many things we got wrong along the way of uncertainty and didn't convey that science isn't always evolving search for what is the truth. There's plenty no shortage of uncertainty at any moment. So can you recap some of the, you did so much work during the pandemic and obviously some of it's in the book. What were some of the major things that you took out of proof and truth from the pandemic?Adam Kucharski (09:14):I think it was almost this story of two hearts because on the one hand, science was the thing that got us where we are today. The reason that so much normality could resume and so much risk was reduced was development of vaccines and the understanding of treatments and the understanding of variants as they came to their characteristics. So it was kind of this amazing opportunity to see this happen faster than it ever happened in history. And I think ever in science, it certainly shifted a lot of my thinking about what's possible and even how we should think about these kinds of problems. But also on the other hand, I think where people might have been more familiar with seeing science progress a bit more slowly and reach consensus around some of these health issues, having that emerge very rapidly can present challenges even we found with some of the work we did on Alpha and then the Delta variants, and it was the early quantification of these.Adam Kucharski (10:08):So really the big question is, is this thing more transmissible? Because at the time countries were thinking about control measures, thinking about relaxing things, and you've got this just enormous social economic health decision-making based around essentially is it a lot more spreadable or is it not? And you only had these fragments of evidence. So I think for me, that was really an illustration of the sharp end. And I think what we ended up doing with some of those was rather than arguing over a precise number, something like Delta, instead we kind of looked at, well, what's the range that matters? So in the sense of arguing over whether it's 40% or 50% or 30% more transmissible is perhaps less important than being, it's substantially more transmissible and it's going to start going up. Is it going to go up extremely fast or just very fast?Adam Kucharski (10:59):That's still a very useful conclusion. I think what often created some of the more challenges, I think the things that on reflection people looking back pick up on are where there was probably overstated certainty. We saw that around some of the airborne spread, for example, stated as a fact by in some cases some organizations, I think in some situations as well, governments had a constraint and presented it as scientific. So the UK, for example, would say testing isn't useful. And what was happening at the time was there wasn't enough tests. So it was more a case of they can't test at that volume. But I think blowing between what the science was saying and what the decision-making, and I think also one thing we found in the UK was we made a lot of the epidemiological evidence available. I think that was really, I think something that was important.Adam Kucharski (11:51):I found it a lot easier to communicate if talking to the media to be able to say, look, this is the paper that's out, this is what it means, this is the evidence. I always found it quite uncomfortable having to communicate things where you knew there were reports behind the scenes, but you couldn't actually articulate. But I think what that did is it created this impression that particularly epidemiology was driving the decision-making a lot more than it perhaps was in reality because so much of that was being made public and a lot more of the evidence around education or economics was being done behind the scenes. I think that created this kind of asymmetry in public perception about how that was feeding in. And so, I think there was always that, and it happens, it is really hard as well as a scientist when you've got journalists asking you how to run the country to work out those steps of am I describing the evidence behind what we're seeing? Am I describing the evidence about different interventions or am I proposing to some extent my value system on what we do? And I think all of that in very intense times can be very easy to get blurred together in public communication. I think we saw a few examples of that where things were being the follow the science on policy type angle where actually once you get into what you're prioritizing within a society, quite rightly, you've got other things beyond just the epidemiology driving that.Eric Topol (13:09):Yeah, I mean that term that you just use follow the science is such an important term because it tells us about the dynamic aspect. It isn't just a snapshot, it's constantly being revised. But during the pandemic we had things like the six-foot rule that was never supported by data, but yet still today, if I walk around my hospital and there's still the footprints of the six-foot rule and not paying attention to the fact that this was airborne and took years before some of these things were accepted. The flatten the curve stuff with lockdowns, which I never was supportive of that, but perhaps at the worst point, the idea that hospitals would get overrun was an issue, but it got carried away with school shutdowns for prolonged periods and in some parts of the world, especially very stringent lockdowns. But anyway, we learned a lot.Eric Topol (14:10):But perhaps one of the greatest lessons is that people's expectations about science is that it's absolute and somehow you have this truth that's not there. I mean, it's getting revised. It's kind of on the job training, it's on this case on the pandemic revision. But very interesting. And that gets us to, I think the next topic, which I think is a fundamental part of the book distributed throughout the book, which is the different types of proof in biomedicine and of course across all these domains. And so, you take us through things like randomized trials, p-values, 95 percent confidence intervals, counterfactuals, causation and correlation, peer review, the works, which is great because a lot of people have misconceptions of these things. So for example, randomized trials, which is the temple of the randomized trials, they're not as great as a lot of people think, yes, they can help us establish cause and effect, but they're skewed because of the people who come into the trial. So they may not at all be a representative sample. What are your thoughts about over deference to randomized trials?Adam Kucharski (15:31):Yeah, I think that the story of how we rank evidence in medicines a fascinating one. I mean even just how long it took for people to think about these elements of randomization. Fundamentally, what we're trying to do when we have evidence here in medicine or science is prevent ourselves from confusing randomness for a signal. I mean, that's fundamentally, we don't want to mistake something, we think it's going on and it's not. And the challenge, particularly with any intervention is you only get to see one version of reality. You can't give someone a drug, follow them, rewind history, not give them the drug and then follow them again. So one of the things that essentially randomization allows us to do is, if you have two groups, one that's been randomized, one that hasn't on average, the difference in outcomes between those groups is going to be down to the treatment effect.Adam Kucharski (16:20):So it doesn't necessarily mean in reality that'd be the case, but on average that's the expectation that you'd have. And it's kind of interesting actually that the first modern randomized control trial (RCT) in medicine in 1947, this is for TB and streptomycin. The randomization element actually, it wasn't so much statistical as behavioral, that if you have people coming to hospital, you could to some extent just say, we'll just alternate. We're not going to randomize. We're just going to first patient we'll say is a control, second patient a treatment. But what they found in a lot of previous studies was doctors have bias. Maybe that patient looks a little bit ill or that one maybe is on borderline for eligibility. And often you got these quite striking imbalances when you allowed it for human judgment. So it was really about shielding against those behavioral elements. But I think there's a few situations, it's a really powerful tool for a lot of these questions, but as you mentioned, one is this issue of you have the population you study on and then perhaps in reality how that translates elsewhere.Adam Kucharski (17:17):And we see, I mean things like flu vaccines are a good example, which are very dependent on immunity and evolution and what goes on in different populations. Sometimes you've had a result on a vaccine in one place and then the effectiveness doesn't translate in the same way to somewhere else. I think the other really important thing to bear in mind is, as I said, it's the averaging that you're getting an average effect between two different groups. And I think we see certainly a lot of development around things like personalized medicine where actually you're much more interested in the outcome for the individual. And so, what a trial can give you evidence is on average across a group, this is the effect that I can expect this intervention to have. But we've now seen more of the emergence things like N=1 studies where you can actually over the same individual, particularly for chronic conditions, look at those kind of interventions.Adam Kucharski (18:05):And also there's just these extreme examples where you're ethically not going to run a trial, there's never been a trial of whether it's a good idea to have intensive care units in hospitals or there's a lot of these kind of historical treatments which are just so overwhelmingly effective that we're not going to run trial. So almost this hierarchy over time, you can see it getting shifted because actually you do have these situations where other forms of evidence can get you either closer to what you need or just more feasibly an answer where it's just not ethical or practical to do an RCT.Eric Topol (18:37):And that brings us to the natural experiments I just wrote about recently, the one with shingles, which there's two big natural experiments to suggest that shingles vaccine might reduce the risk of Alzheimer's, an added benefit beyond the shingles that was not anticipated. Your thoughts about natural experiments, because here you're getting a much different type of population assessment, again, not at the individual level, but not necessarily restricted by some potentially skewed enrollment criteria.Adam Kucharski (19:14):I think this is as emerged as a really valuable tool. It's kind of interesting, in the book you're talking to economists like Josh Angrist, that a lot of these ideas emerge in epidemiology, but I think were really then taken up by economists, particularly as they wanted to add more credibility to a lot of these policy questions. And ultimately, it comes down to this issue that for a lot of problems, we can't necessarily intervene and randomize, but there might be a situation that's done it to some extent for us, so the classic example is the Vietnam draft where it was kind of random birthdays with drawn out of lottery. And so, there's been a lot of studies subsequently about the effect of serving in the military on different subsequent lifetime outcomes because broadly those people have been randomized. It was for a different reason. But you've got that element of randomization driving that.Adam Kucharski (20:02):And so again, with some of the recent shingles data and other studies, you might have a situation for example, where there's been an intervention that's somewhat arbitrary in terms of time. It's a cutoff on a birth date, for example. And under certain assumptions you could think, well, actually there's no real reason for the person on this day and this day to be fundamentally different. I mean, perhaps there might be effects of cohorts if it's school years or this sort of thing. But generally, this isn't the same as having people who are very, very different ages and very different characteristics. It's just nature, or in this case, just a policy intervention for a different reason has given you that randomization, which allows you or pseudo randomization, which allows you to then look at something about the effect of an intervention that you wouldn't as reliably if you were just digging into the data of yes, no who's received a vaccine.Eric Topol (20:52):Yeah, no, I think it's really valuable. And now I think increasingly given priority, if you can find these natural experiments and they're not always so abundant to use to extrapolate from, but when they are, they're phenomenal. The causation correlation is so big. The issue there, I mean Judea Pearl's, the Book of Why, and you give so many great examples throughout the book in Proof. I wonder if you could comment that on that a bit more because this is where associations are confused somehow or other with a direct effect. And we unfortunately make these jumps all too frequently. Perhaps it's the most common problem that's occurring in the way we interpret medical research data.Adam Kucharski (21:52):Yeah, I think it's an issue that I think a lot of people get drilled into in their training just because a correlation between things doesn't mean that that thing causes this thing. But it really struck me as I talked to people, researching the book, in practice in research, there's actually a bit more to it in how it's played out. So first of all, if there's a correlation between things, it doesn't tell you much generally that's useful for intervention. If two things are correlated, it doesn't mean that changing that thing's going to have an effect on that thing. There might be something that's influencing both of them. If you have more ice cream sales, it will lead to more heat stroke cases. It doesn't mean that changing ice cream sales is going to have that effect, but it does allow you to make predictions potentially because if you can identify consistent patterns, you can say, okay, if this thing going up, I'm going to make a prediction that this thing's going up.Adam Kucharski (22:37):So one thing I found quite striking, actually talking to research in different fields is how many fields choose to focus on prediction because it kind of avoids having to deal with this cause and effect problem. And even in fields like psychology, it was kind of interesting that there's a lot of focus on predicting things like relationship outcomes, but actually for people, you don't want a prediction about your relationship. You want to know, well, how can I do something about it? You don't just want someone to sell you your relationship's going to go downhill. So there's almost part of the challenge is people just got stuck on prediction because it's an easier field of work, whereas actually some of those problems will involve intervention. I think the other thing that really stood out for me is in epidemiology and a lot of other fields, rightly, people are very cautious to not get that mixed up.Adam Kucharski (23:24):They don't want to mix up correlations or associations with causation, but you've kind of got this weird situation where a lot of papers go out of their way to not use causal language and say it's an association, it's just an association. It's just an association. You can't say anything about causality. And then the end of the paper, they'll say, well, we should think about introducing more of this thing or restricting this thing. So really the whole paper and its purpose is framed around a causal intervention, but it's extremely careful throughout the paper to not frame it as a causal claim. So I think we almost by skirting that too much, we actually avoid the problems that people sometimes care about. And I think a lot of the nice work that's been going on in causal inference is trying to get people to confront this more head on rather than say, okay, you can just stay in this prediction world and that's fine. And then just later maybe make a policy suggestion off the back of it.Eric Topol (24:20):Yeah, I think this is cause and effect is a very alluring concept to support proof as you so nicely go through in the book. But of course, one of the things that we use to help us is the biological mechanism. So here you have, let's say for example, you're trying to get a new drug approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), and the request is, well, we want two trials, randomized trials, independent. We want to have p-values that are significant, and we want to know the biological mechanism ideally with the dose response of the drug. But there are many drugs as you review that have no biological mechanism established. And even when the tobacco problems were mounting, the actual mechanism of how tobacco use caused cancer wasn't known. So how important is the biological mechanism, especially now that we're well into the AI world where explainability is demanded. And so, we don't know the mechanism, but we also don't know the mechanism and lots of things in medicine too, like anesthetics and even things as simple as aspirin, how it works and many others. So how do we deal with this quest for the biological mechanism?Adam Kucharski (25:42):I think that's a really good point. It shows almost a lot of the transition I think we're going through currently. I think particularly for things like smoking cancer where it's very hard to run a trial. You can't make people randomly take up smoking. Having those additional pieces of evidence, whether it's an analogy with a similar carcinogen, whether it's a biological mechanism, can help almost give you more supports for that argument that there's a cause and effect going on. But I think what I found quite striking, and I realized actually that it's something that had kind of bothered me a bit and I'd be interested to hear whether it bothers you, but with the emergence of AI, it's almost a bit of the loss of scientific satisfaction. I think you grow up with learning about how the world works and why this is doing what it's doing.Adam Kucharski (26:26):And I talked for example of some of the people involved with AlphaFold and some of the subsequent work in installing those predictions about structures. And they'd almost made peace with it, which I found interesting because I think they started off being a bit uncomfortable with like, yeah, you've got these remarkable AI models making these predictions, but we don't understand still biologically what's happening here. But I think they're just settled in saying, well, biology is really complex on some of these problems, and if we can have a tool that can give us this extremely valuable information, maybe that's okay. And it was just interesting that they'd really kind of gone through that kind process, which I think a lot of people are still grappling with and that almost that discomfort of using AI and what's going to convince you that that's a useful reliable prediction whether it's something like predicting protein folding or getting in a self-driving car. What's the evidence you need to convince you that's reliable?Eric Topol (27:26):Yeah, no, I'm so glad you brought that up because when Demis Hassabis and John Jumper won the Nobel Prize, the point I made was maybe there should be an asterisk with AI because they don't know how it works. I mean, they had all the rich data from the protein data bank, and they got the transformer model to do it for 200 million protein structure prediction, but they still to this day don't fully understand how the model really was working. So it reinforces what you're just saying. And of course, it cuts across so many types of AI. It's just that we tend to hold different standards in medicine not realizing that there's lots of lack of explainability for routine medical treatments today. Now one of the things that I found fascinating in your book, because there's different levels of proof, different types of proof, but solid logical systems.Eric Topol (28:26):And on page 60 of the book, especially pertinent to the US right now, there is a bit about Kurt Gödel and what he did there was he basically, there was a question about dictatorship in the US could it ever occur? And Gödel says, “oh, yes, I can prove it.” And he's using the constitution itself to prove it, which I found fascinating because of course we're seeing that emerge right now. Can you give us a little bit more about this, because this is fascinating about the Fifth Amendment, and I mean I never thought that the Constitution would allow for a dictatorship to emerge.Adam Kucharski (29:23):And this was a fascinating story, Kurt Gödel who is one of the greatest logical minds of the 20th century and did a lot of work, particularly in the early 20th century around system of rules, particularly things like mathematics and whether they can ever be really fully satisfying. So particularly in mathematics, he showed that there were this problem that is very hard to have a set of rules for something like arithmetic that was both complete and covered every situation, but also had no contradictions. And I think a lot of countries, if you go back, things like Napoleonic code and these attempts to almost write down every possible legal situation that could be imaginable, always just ascended into either they needed amendments or they had contradictions. I think Gödel's work really summed it up, and there's a story, this is in the late forties when he had his citizenship interview and Einstein and Oskar Morgenstern went along as witnesses for him.Adam Kucharski (30:17):And it's always told as kind of a lighthearted story as this logical mind, this academic just saying something silly in front of the judge. And actually, to my own admission, I've in the past given talks and mentioned it in this slightly kind of lighthearted way, but for the book I got talking to a few people who'd taken it more seriously. I realized actually he's this extremely logically focused mind at the time, and maybe there should have been something more to it. And people who have kind of dug more into possibilities was saying, well, what could he have spotted that bothered him? And a lot of his work that he did about consistency in mass was around particularly self-referential statements. So if I say this sentence is false, it's self-referential and if it is false, then it's true, but if it's true, then it's false and you get this kind of weird self-referential contradictions.Adam Kucharski (31:13):And so, one of the theories about Gödel was that in the Constitution, it wasn't that there was a kind of rule for someone can become a dictator, but rather people can use the mechanisms within the Constitution to make it easier to make further amendments. And he kind of downward cycle of amendment that he had seen happening in Europe and the run up to the war, and again, because this is never fully documented exactly what he thought, but it's one of the theories that it wouldn't just be outright that it would just be this cycle process of weakening and weakening and weakening and making it easier to add. And actually, when I wrote that, it was all the earlier bits of the book that I drafted, I did sort of debate whether including it I thought, is this actually just a bit in the weeds of American history? And here we are. Yeah, it's remarkable.Eric Topol (32:00):Yeah, yeah. No, I mean I found, it struck me when I was reading this because here back in 1947, there was somebody predicting that this could happen based on some, if you want to call it loopholes if you will, or the ability to change things, even though you would've thought otherwise that there wasn't any possible capability for that to happen. Now, one of the things I thought was a bit contradictory is two parts here. One is from Angus Deaton, he wrote, “Gold standard thinking is magical thinking.” And then the other is what you basically are concluding in many respects. “To navigate proof, we must reach into a thicket of errors and biases. We must confront monsters and embrace uncertainty, balancing — and rebalancing —our beliefs. We must seek out every useful fragment of data, gather every relevant tool, searching wider and climbing further. Finding the good foundations among the bad. Dodging dogma and falsehoods. Questioning. Measuring. Triangulating. Convincing. Then perhaps, just perhaps, we'll reach the truth in time.” So here you have on the one hand your search for the truth, proof, which I think that little paragraph says it all. In many respects, it sums up somewhat to the work that you review here and on the other you have this Nobel laureate saying, you don't have to go to extremes here. The enemy of good is perfect, perhaps. I mean, how do you reconcile this sense that you shouldn't go so far? Don't search for absolute perfection of proof.Adam Kucharski (33:58):Yeah, I think that encapsulates a lot of what the book is about, is that search for certainty and how far do you have to go. I think one of the things, there's a lot of interesting discussion, some fascinating papers around at what point do you use these studies? What are their flaws? But I think one of the things that does stand out is across fields, across science, medicine, even if you going to cover law, AI, having these kind of cookie cutter, this is the definitive way of doing it. And if you just follow this simple rule, if you do your p-value, you'll get there and you'll be fine. And I think that's where a lot of the danger is. And I think that's what we've seen over time. Certain science people chasing certain targets and all the behaviors that come around that or in certain situations disregarding valuable evidence because you've got this kind of gold standard and nothing else will do.Adam Kucharski (34:56):And I think particularly in a crisis, it's very dangerous to have that because you might have a low level of evidence that demands a certain action and you almost bias yourself towards inaction if you have these kind of very simple thresholds. So I think for me, across all of these stories and across the whole book, I mean William Gosset who did a lot of pioneering work on statistical experiments at Guinness in the early 20th century, he had this nice question he sort of framed is, how much do we lose? And if we're thinking about the problems, there's always more studies we can do, there's always more confidence we can have, but whether it's a patient we want to treat or crisis we need to deal with, we need to work out actually getting that level of proof that's really appropriate for where we are currently.Eric Topol (35:49):I think exceptionally important that there's this kind of spectrum or continuum in following science and search for truth and that distinction, I think really nails it. Now, one of the things that's unique in the book is you don't just go through all the different types of how you would get to proof, but you also talk about how the evidence is acted on. And for example, you quote, “they spent a lot of time misinforming themselves.” This is the whole idea of taking data and torturing it or using it, dredging it however way you want to support either conspiracy theories or alternative facts. Basically, manipulating sometimes even emasculating what evidence and data we have. And one of the sentences, or I guess this is from Sir Francis Bacon, “truth is a daughter of time”, but the added part is not authority. So here we have our president here that repeats things that are wrong, fabricated or wrong, and he keeps repeating to the point that people believe it's true. But on the other hand, you could say truth is a daughter of time because you like to not accept any truth immediately. You like to see it get replicated and further supported, backed up. So in that one sentence, truth is a daughter of time not authority, there's the whole ball of wax here. Can you take us through that? Because I just think that people don't understand that truth being tested over time, but also manipulated by its repetition. This is a part of the big problem that we live in right now.Adam Kucharski (37:51):And I think it's something that writing the book and actually just reflecting on it subsequently has made me think about a lot in just how people approach these kinds of problems. I think that there's an idea that conspiracy theorists are just lazy and have maybe just fallen for a random thing, but talking to people, you really think about these things a lot more in the field. And actually, the more I've ended up engaging with people who believe things that are just outright unevidenced around vaccines, around health issues, they often have this mountain of papers and data to hand and a lot of it, often they will be peer reviewed papers. It won't necessarily be supporting the point that they think it's supports.Adam Kucharski (38:35):But it's not something that you can just say everything you're saying is false, that there's actually often a lot of things that have been put together and it's just that leap to that conclusion. I think you also see a lot of scientific language borrowed. So I gave a talker early this year and it got posted on YouTube. It had conspiracy theories it, and there was a lot of conspiracy theory supporters who piled in the comments and one of the points they made is skepticism is good. It's the kind of law society, take no one's word for it, you need this. We are the ones that are kind of doing science and people who just assume that science is settled are in the wrong. And again, you also mentioned that repetition. There's this phenomenon, it's the illusory truth problem that if you repeatedly tell someone someone's something's false, it'll increase their belief in it even if it's something quite outrageous.Adam Kucharski (39:27):And that mimics that scientific repetition because people kind of say, okay, well if I've heard it again and again, it's almost like if you tweak these as mini experiments, I'm just accumulating evidence that this thing is true. So it made me think a lot about how you've got essentially a lot of mimicry of the scientific method, amount of data and how you present it and this kind of skepticism being good, but I think a lot of it comes down to as well as just looking at theological flaws, but also ability to be wrong in not actually seeking out things that confirm. I think all of us, it's something that I've certainly tried to do a lot working on emergencies, and one of the scientific advisory groups that I worked on almost it became a catchphrase whenever someone presented something, they finished by saying, tell me why I'm wrong.Adam Kucharski (40:14):And if you've got a variant that's more transmissible, I don't want to be right about that really. And it is something that is quite hard to do and I found it is particularly for something that's quite high pressure, trying to get a policymaker or someone to write even just non-publicly by themselves, write down what you think's going to happen or write down what would convince you that you are wrong about something. I think particularly on contentious issues where someone's got perhaps a lot of public persona wrapped up in something that's really hard to do, but I think it's those kind of elements that distinguish between getting sucked into a conspiracy theory and really seeking out evidence that supports it and trying to just get your theory stronger and stronger and actually seeking out things that might overturn your belief about the world. And it's often those things that we don't want overturned. I think those are the views that we all have politically or in other ways, and that's often where the problems lie.Eric Topol (41:11):Yeah, I think this is perhaps one of, if not the most essential part here is that to try to deal with the different views. We have biases as you emphasized throughout, but if you can use these different types of proof to have a sound discussion, conversation, refutation whereby you don't summarily dismiss another view which may be skewed and maybe spurious or just absolutely wrong, maybe fabricated whatever, but did you can engage and say, here's why these are my proof points, or this is why there's some extent of certainty you can have regarding this view of the data. I think this is so fundamental because unfortunately as we saw during the pandemic, the strident minority, which were the anti-science, anti-vaxxers, they were summarily dismissed as being kooks and adopting conspiracy theories without the right engagement and the right debates. And I think this might've helped along the way, no less the fact that a lot of scientists didn't really want to engage in the first place and adopt this methodical proof that you've advocated in the book so many different ways to support a hypothesis or an assertion. Now, we've covered a lot here, Adam. Have I missed some central parts of the book and the effort because it's really quite extraordinary. I know it's your third book, but it's certainly a standout and it certainly it's a standout not just for your books, but books on this topic.Adam Kucharski (43:13):Thanks. And it's much appreciated. It was not an easy book to write. I think at times, I kind of wondered if I should have taken on the topic and I think a core thing, your last point speaks to that. I think a core thing is that gap often between what convinces us and what convinces someone else. I think it's often very tempting as a scientist to say the evidence is clear or the science has proved this. But even on something like the vaccines, you do get the loud minority who perhaps think they're putting microchips in people and outlandish views, but you actually get a lot more people who might just have some skepticism of pharmaceutical companies or they might have, my wife was pregnant actually at the time during Covid and we waited up because there wasn't much data on pregnancy and the vaccine. And I think it's just finding what is convincing. Is it having more studies from other countries? Is it understanding more about the biology? Is it understanding how you evaluate some of those safety signals? And I think that's just really important to not just think what convinces us and it's going to be obvious to other people, but actually think where are they coming from? Because ultimately having proof isn't that good unless it leads to the action that can make lives better.Eric Topol (44:24):Yeah. Well, look, you've inculcated my mind with this book, Adam, called Proof. Anytime I think of the word proof, I'm going to be thinking about you. So thank you. Thanks for taking the time to have a conversation about your book, your work, and I know we're going to count on you for the astute mathematics and analysis of outbreaks in the future, which we will see unfortunately. We are seeing now, in fact already in this country with measles and whatnot. So thank you and we'll continue to follow your great work.**************************************Thanks for listening, watching or reading this Ground Truths podcast/post.If you found this interesting please share it!That makes the work involved in putting these together especially worthwhile.I'm also appreciative for your subscribing to Ground Truths. All content —its newsletters, analyses, and podcasts—is free, open-access. I'm fortunate to get help from my producer Jessica Nguyen and Sinjun Balabanoff for audio/video tech support to pull these podcasts together for Scripps Research.Paid subscriptions are voluntary and all proceeds from them go to support Scripps Research. They do allow for posting comments and questions, which I do my best to respond to. Please don't hesitate to post comments and give me feedback. Many thanks to those who have contributed—they have greatly helped fund our summer internship programs for the past two years.A bit of an update on SUPER AGERSMy book has been selected as a Next Big Idea Club winner for Season 26 by Adam Grant, Malcolm Gladwell, Susan Cain, and Daniel Pink. This club has spotlighted the most groundbreaking nonfiction books for over a decade. As a winning title, my book will be shipped to thousands of thoughtful readers like you, featured alongside a reading guide, a "Book Bite," Next Big Idea Podcast episode as well as a live virtual Q&A with me in the club's vibrant online community. If you're interested in joining the club, here's a promo code SEASON26 for 20% off at the website. SUPER AGERS reached #3 for all books on Amazon this week. This was in part related to the segment on the book on the TODAY SHOW which you can see here. Also at Amazon there is a remarkable sale on the hardcover book for $10.l0 at the moment for up to 4 copies. Not sure how long it will last or what prompted it.The journalist Paul von Zielbauer has a Substack “Aging With Strength” and did an extensive interview with me on the biology of aging and how we can prevent the major age-related diseases. Here's the link. Get full access to Ground Truths at erictopol.substack.com/subscribe
This week we speak to multidisciplinary independent researcher William Sarill, whose life has traced a high-dimensional curve through biochemistry, art restoration, physics, and esotericism (and I'm stopping the list here but it goes on). Bill is one of the only people I know who has the scientific chops to understand and explain how to possibly unify thermodynamics with general relativity AND has gone swimming into the deep end of The Weird for long enough to develop an appreciation for its paradoxical profundities. He can also boast personal friendships with two of the greatest (and somewhat diametrically opposed) science fiction authors ever: Phil Dick and Isaac Asimov. In this conversation we start by exploring some of his discoveries and insights as an intuition-guided laboratory biomedical researcher and follow the river upstream into his synthesis of emerging theoretical frameworks that might make sense of PKD's legendary VALIS experiences — the encounter with high strangeness that drove him to write The Exegesis, over a million words of effort to explain the deep structure of time and reality. It's time for new ways to think about time! Enjoy…✨ Support This Work• Buy my brain for hourly consulting or advisory work on retainer• Become a patron on Substack or Patreon• Help me find backing for my next big project Humans On The Loop• Buy the books we discuss from my Bookshop.org reading list• Buy original paintings and prints or commission new work• Join the conversation on Discord in the Holistic Technology & Wise Innovation and Future Fossils servers• Make one-off donations at @futurefossils on Venmo, $manfredmacx on CashApp, or @michaelgarfield on PayPal• Buy the show's music on Bandcamp — intro “Olympus Mons” from the Martian Arts EP & outro “Sonnet A” from the Double-Edged Sword EP✨ Go DeeperBill's Academia.edu pageBill's talk at the PKD Film FestivalBill's profile for the Palo Alto Longevity PrizeBill's story on Facebook about his biochemistry researchBill in the FF Facebook group re: Simulation Theory, re: The Zero-Point Field, re: everything he's done that no one else has, re: how PKD predicted ChatGPT"If you find this world bad, you should see some of the others" by PKDThe Wyrd of the Early Earth: Cellular Pre-sense in the Primordial Soup by Eric WargoMy first and second interviews with William Irwin ThompsonMy lecture on biology, time, and myth from Oregon Eclipse Gathering 2017"I understand Philip K. Dick" by Terence McKennaWeird Studies on PKD and "The Trash Stratum" Part 1 & Part 2Weird Studies with Joshua Ramey on divination in scienceSparks of Genius: The Thirteen Thinking Tools of the World's Most Creative People by Robert & Michele Root-BernsteinDiscovering by Robert Root-Bernstein✨ MentionsPhilip K. Dick, Bruce Damer, Iain McGilchrist, Eric Wargo, Stu Kauffman, Michael Persinger, Alfred North Whitehead, Terence McKenna, Karl Friedrich, Mike Parker, Chris Jeynes, David Wolpert, Ivo Dinov, Albert Einstein, Kurt Gödel, Erwin Schroedinger, Kaluza & Klein, Richard Feynman, Euclid, Hermann Minkowski, James Clerk Maxwell, The I Ching, St. Augustine, Stephen Hawking, Jim Hartle, Alexander Vilenkin, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Timothy Morton, Futurama, The Wachowski Siblings, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Leonard Euler, Paramahansa Yogananda, Alfred Korbzybski, Frank Herbert, Robert Heinlein, Claude Shannon, Ludwig Boltzmann, Carl Jung, Danny Jones, Mark Newman, Michael Lachmann, Cristopher Moore, Jessica Flack, Robert Root Bernstein, Louis Pasteur, Alexander Fleming, Ruth Bernstein, Andres Gomez Emilsson, Diane Musho Hamilton This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit michaelgarfield.substack.com/subscribe